What's a Femtocell?

Two weeks ago, if you would have asked me what a femtocell was, I would have guessed it was a close cousin of the sleeper cell. All of a sudden I'm hearing a lot of buzz about femtocells. I called Bill Belt, Senior Director for Technology and Standards at the CEA, to ask him whether it was on his radar yet.

You bet it is.

A femtocell is the world's worst name for a very exciting technology. It's a box (about the size of a router) that you connect to your broadband router; it essentially gives you your very own cell phone tower, right in your home.

Who wants a cell phone tower at home? Anyone who's ever had to stand immobile to keep their connection, or hang their head out the window to get another bar on their phone, or--heaven forbid--to walk up a hill.

Femtocell-outfitted homes will have crystal-clear phone coverage. And just imagine driving up to your house and having your phone know that it's time to switch over to your femtocell to keep up your coverage without missing a beat. Heck, you can even make a call from the basement.

The talk is that femtocells will be low cost, low power, and compact. They work on the same frequency as a cell site and share some similar technology. Instead of searching for a cell tower to connect to, the femtocell base station picks up the mobile phone signal and sends it out via the Internet via your broadband connection. Initially, femtocells will predominantly be used to get clear reception, but ultimately they could also be used for accessing data and Internet connectivity (similar to how EV-DO is used by the cellular carriers today). Down the road, this could mean some competition for 802.11 Wi-Fi as the home wireless standard.

Belt reminded me that cell phones work best near roadways since the cell phone's ancestry is, in fact, from a line of car phones. And one of the main reasons for cell phone disatisfaction is poor coverage. And now that people are dumping their landline phones and going cellular, it makes perfect sense for the carriers to step up with a solution.

Needless to say, security will be a big concern for femtocells (as with other wireless technology). Unlike other industry-wide standards approaches like 802.11 and WiMax, it seems that, at least initially, each phone carrier will be acting pretty independently.

There should be a number of femtocell announcements at CES and products should begin to appear on the market by late 2008. Now, about that word? According to a recent BusinessWeek article, "femto" means "one-quadrillionth the size of a given unit." What can we deduce from the name? Cell phone towers are gargantuan, and engineers, not marketers, named this breakthrough technology.

Thanks to Reuters for the image.