residential femtocells

Femtocell and Small Cell is touted as an ideal solution for cutting mobile costs and boosting indoor network coverage. For mobile devices, it promises to offers faster data connections and fewer dropped calls, and improved mobile voice quality. Despites their benefits these devices have show slow take up from residential and small businesses. However, according to a report titled “Small Cells and Femtocells Market Shares, Strategy, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2013 to 2019”, this is about the change.

Today the world received its first dual mode femtocell or small-cell base station supporting both 3G and LTE simultaneously.  Developed by NTT DOCOMO, the new femtocell units will make it even easier for homes in mobile signal dead spot to remain connected.

The Femtocell device is plug-and-play and provides 3G/LTE service coverage in a range of up to a long distance, depending on actual conditions. It automatically configures itself upon connection to the surrounding devices in its surroundings.

According to The Register, SoftBank Mobile of Japan is offering free ADSL and free femtocell to anyone who will let SoftBank install a femtocell in their home or business, but customers will still have pay for mobile calls.  The free femtocells on offer are made by Ubiquisys and are back by Google.

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) announced the selection of Continuous Computing(R), a leader in wireless protocol software, and mimoOn GmbH, a leader in software defined radio solutions, as third parties to offer integrated solutions for HSPA and LTE enterprise and residential femtocells. Texas Instruments is also working on seperate Wi-Fi home networking (Celeno and Texas Instruments to Enable Next-Generation Cable Modem Gateways) solution with Celeno.