Though the market appears to be pumped about femto cells, a number of issues remain unresolved.  Whether those issues turn into storm clouds — and eventually rain on the femto cell parade — is simply a matter of innovation.

If femto cell suppliers can invent solutions that overcome these issues, the femto cell market will launch like a roman candle.  If not, the result will be smoke and sputtering noises for years to come.

Here’s the list in no particular order:

1. Automatic access control and mobility — Femto cells need to prevent drive-by users from camping on inadvertently, but also hand-in and hand-out authorized live calls to and from macro cells.
2. Simple activation — Femto cells need to be as close to zero-touch as possible on activation: probably a single phone call with serial number and a dead-simple web interface to add users.  If femto cells are as bad as Wi-Fi configurations, they will flop.
3. Excellent security — Because femto cells will connect via any Internet service, wireless operators need femto cells to authenticate themselves and then encrypt all traffic using a security tunneling protocol such as IPsec.  Anything less than excellent security will be unacceptable — even for the most liberal wireless operator.
4. High-end scalability — Operators will need to connect millions of femto cells.  But unlike cell phones, femto cells will present millions of IPsec tunnels acting like corporate VPN links that never go down.  This will require great honking security gateways to terminate tunnels and handoff calls.
5. Interference mitigation — As I have previously written, femto cells will need enough intelligence to listen, learn, and then automatically mitigate RF interferenece from macro cells and other femto cells on the block.
6. Core network interface — Because femto cells will use existing mobile phones, they will need to connect to the existing mobile operator core network — often a massively clunky mess.  This has already spurred an architectural battle among femto cell competitors.  Presently it is the wild, wild west, but the least disruptive solution will likely win.

Full disclosure: Employed by AIRV at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

Femto cells are miniature base stations — low-power cellular access points for the home environment.  Plug a femto cell into your cable modem or DSL router and you light up 5 bars of CDMA or UMTS cell coverage in your home.  If you live in a small town (like I do) that has been arguing about the location of cell towers for close to eight years, you will be a happy camper.  In the next 12–24 months, virtually every mobile operator in the known universe will be offering femto cells to consumers.

But femto cells are not without their technical hurdles.  One of those challenges is the requirement for femto cells to behave nicely in the overall macro cell radio frequency (RF) system.  In other words, when thousands or millions of femto cells interact with the larger cellular infrastructure in the RF domain, they must mitigate the potential interference with other femto cells and with the surrounding macro cell network.

Most people think of femto cells as Wi-Fi routers or access points with different radios.  But femto cells are quite different from Wi-Fi access points. When Netgear, D-Link, or Buffulo ship consumer-grade Wi-Fi routers or access points, they rarely lose sleep over their products’ interaction as a larger system.  Wi-Fi operates in unlicensed bands on a world-wide basis — and in the world of high-volume Wi-Fi products, each product is considered autonomous as long as it passes the test for regulatory compliance.  Some Wi-Fi products automatically select non-interfering channels and adjust their transmit power to avoid interference, and the whole next generation of Wi-Fi products based on 802.11n will use MIMO technology to punch through the noise.  Even so, few consumer designs consider their behavior in a larger system of millions of chatty little radios.  Since no one has responsibility for the good behavior of the overall system, Wi-Fi is your basic free for all.  If your Wi-Fi router is interfering with your neighbor’s, he can tell you to do something about it…that is, if he can find you.

Back to femto cells.  Unlike Wi-Fi, femto cells will interact with macro cell towers and other femto cells in close proximity.  As a result, every femto cell must have a means of listening to the environment around it, and then adjusting approprately to mitigate interference.  What does appropriately mean?

It turns out that each femto cell manufacturer will have its own method of mitigating RF interference.  But there is — in fact — no standard means of doing so at the moment.  Each femto cell producer will have an opportunity to thrive on inventions that outshine the competiton in this area, or crash and burn on something that hardly works at all.  Stay tuned.  The next 12–18 months will be interesting.

Full disclosure: Employed by AIRV at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

The telecom world is abuzz with news of femto cells — minature cellular base stations that provide mobile coverage in the home.  A number of wireless operators have announced plans to deploy millions of the widgets (Vodafone, Sprint, Softbank, Orange, Clearwire, and others) and a pile of vendors have announced the intent to offer femto cell products (Huawei, Ericsson, Ubiquisys, ip-access, Airwalk, to name a few).  Femtos are likely to be offered in nearly every flavor of cellular technology: UMTS, GSM, CDMA, and WiMAX.

For consumers the value proposition is simple: better coverage, maybe family in-home calling plans, and higher performance data services since cellular bandwidth is shared by fewer users.

For operators, they get a much lower cost way of delivering mobile broadband — consumers pay for the femtos and the backhaul vial DSL, cable, or fiber services.

If this shift towards tiny base stations in the home does occur in a big way, what does it mean for competing technologies? 

• Muni-Wi-Fi could suffer further indignities.  As carried recently by the AP, it is unclear whether Muni-Wi-Fi can move beyond a community service project.  If mobile operators can offer better stuff via femtos, why would a town pony up for a municiple Wi-Fi project?  Look out, Tropos and BelAir.
• Home Wi-Fi routers will be in a roil.  Wi-Fi’s inherent interference problems will likely be mitigated by the introduction of 802.11n products, but Wi-Fi routers will be competing with femto cell products operating in the licensed spectrum and controlled by experienced operators.  In addition, femto cell products will also plug into the same DSL and cable modems as today’s Wi-Fi routers.  Some DSL router vendors, such as 2Wire have announced plans to offer femto cell products, but it remains unclear whether DSL Wi-Fi routers will subsume cellular femto cell technology or whether it will be the other way around.

Full disclosure: No position in Clearwire, Ericsson, France Telecom, Huawei, Softbank, Sprint, or Vodafone at time of writing.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Softbank | Orange | Clearwire | Wi-Fi | DSL | Cable |Vodafone | Sprint | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

In digging into the details of ip.access’ product offering, I ran across a recent television interview with Managing Director, Stephen Mallinson.  When asked about future products for the 3G market, he mentioned that the company was working on an offering for GSM operators that placed a small base station in the home. 

Whoa, Nellie.  A base station for the home?  The company’s current GSM/GPRS/EDGE product, nanoGSM, is designed for in-building deployment and provides backhaul over an Ethernet IP connection.  I would guess that the 3G product would have the same IP backhaul and could be plugged into any broadband service gateway that presents an Ethernet port.  And given the fact that ip.access has already produced a pico cell base station for GSM that looks to be the size of a large-ish consumer access point, I expect the 3G offering to be equally compact.

But wait a minute.  This is not some unlicensed spectrum, Wi-Fi radio widget.  We’re talking about licensed spectrum, right?  This is like dancing with the giants isn’t it?  Presumably, operators like AT&T and Cingular would offer these as part of a 3G service offering — and the license to use the spectrum is held by the operator.  Hmmm.  I guess a license to operate radios on a given band allows mobile operators to put base stations in the home.  Why not?  I wonder what the limitations are on RF transmit power in a case like that?  

Mallinson also said that the consumer 3G base station would be called an access point and priced in the range of “a few hundred euros.”

What is the technical challenge here?  Apart from squeezing the technology into tiny package, someone had better be thinking about automatic channel selection to avoid the problem of base stations interfering with one another.  Today’s cell towers are manually configured by RF engineers.  If my neighbor and I both have 3G access points in our houses, who picks the non-interfering channel?

Technorati Tags: Wireless | GPRS | EDGE | 3G | RF | GSM | Spectrum | Femtocell |

BelAir and ip.access have smooshed together their products.  But the resulting combination is not a galactic, convergent, IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture defined by 3GPP — it is a simple combination of BelAir’s Wi-Fi based metro mesh and ip.access’ GSM pico cell products.

How does it work?  BelAir has stuffed a tiny GSM base station from ip.access inside its metro mesh enclosure, the BelAir 200.  Mounted on a utility pole, the unit becomes a self-contained GSM base station with IP-based wireless backhaul over BelAir’s metro mesh.

What’s it for?  Currently, the two companies are positioning the combined solution as a GSM coverage filler.  Existing mobile operators can place a few nodes in urban areas where customers complain about coverage.

But I think that it could have much broader appeal:

1. Low profile cellular.  I live in a little New England town with terrible cell coverage.  Why?  Because no one can agree on a low-impact cell tower implementation that won’t cause an armed revolt led by the protectors of our colonial architecture.  If we let at&t or Cingular Put 70 to 100 of these puppies on utility poles, everybody’s happy.
2. Wi-Fi service offering.  Along with GSM coverage, mobile operators could offer neighborhood Wi-Fi access to make their customers sticky, or to lure subscribers away from the competition.

What’s in the way?  Money.  The operators must weigh the cost of prolonged disputes and lawsuits over cell tower placements against the cost of a metro/GSM system like this.  Let’s face it, three cell towers are probably cheaper to install and maintain than 100 pole-mounted widgets.  Let’s see how it all costs out when pricing becomes available.

Technorati Tags: WiFi, IMS, Metro, Muni, Wireless, GSM, BelAir, Mesh, Femtocell

Motorola has announced an indoor 3G system supporting both UMTS and HSDPA.  The AXPT High Speed Access Point looks to be about the size of a wide laptop screen (see the pic) and supports speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps.

Photo: Copyright © Motorola

On the surface:

• 3G and Wi-Fi go to war in public places.  The AXPT system will go head to head with Wi-Fi in spaces like airports — a vertical market rife with disputes over the control of spectrum.
• 3G may offer a path of least resistance.  If tenant-landlord disputes become the norm,  licensed spectrum may be less of a hassle.

But this is just the first skirmish in what I believe will be a prolonged war of attrition: ubiquitous, unruly, cheapo Wi-Fi versus expensive, reliable, locked-down 3G.  The indoor mobile equipment play has been tried before and gone virtually nowhere.  To break through past failures in this space, Motorola and others must:

1. Face the fact that Wi-Fi is in nearly every laptop shipping.  Though the sheer volume of mobile handhelds drawfs the numbers of laptops shipping, 3G has a long way to go, yet — and will not displace Wi-Fi in laptops any time soon.  Don’t laugh, but giving away laptop 3G adapters may be a start.
2. Price indoor 3G to compete with Wi-Fi.  Admittedly, indoor 3G is being sold to mobile operators who are significantly less price sensitive than enterprises, but the market reality remains — Wi-Fi gear is incredibly low-cost by comparison.  This is a classic case where “good enough” can easily kill the more elegant product.
3. Make indoor 3G very easy to install.  This is not trivial.  Today’s mobile base stations are basically manually configured by RF technicians, one by one.  Good luck pulling that off with a sea of AXPTs — the little suckers had better be self-organizing in the RF domain.

Directory Tags: | Wireless | WiFi | Wi-Fi | Motorola | Cable | UMTS | CDMA | WiMAX | Muni Wi-Fi | Mobile | Femtocell |

Why little networks will have bigger impact

The big networks are done…bring on the weenie nets

The Internet equipment business is still growing at a healthy clip, but try thinking of a new product to build for big networks that isn’t already in the Cisco or the Juniper price book. Going forward, the little networks of the world — the weenie nets — are more interesting.

Wi-Fi was first

Today, the most popular weenie net on the planet is Wi-Fi. Millions buy Wi-Fi because it is:

• Really cheap. Wireless LAN (WLAN) products were expensive door stops before they were standardized by 802.11.  Now they are built for next to nothing in China, a place where a really good software engineer earns $15K a year.

• Just good enough. Wi-Fi can keep up with your cable or DSL connection and basic web content. What else do you want? At those prices, nothing for the moment. Yes, I know, you need Wi-Fi coverage that reaches to the end of your house, but most suppliers have that problem solved with a new generation of antennas and chips.

• Connected to something good. Without the Internet’s content, plus IM and gaming apps, nobody would have cared about Wi-Fi — enterprise, SMB, or consumer.

Dreams of Smaller, Smaller, More, More

Okay, Wi-Fi has a proven market dynamic and some of the attributes for little networks. What’s next? I can only report on the dreams of the technology community at the moment. Unfortunately, many of these dreams are not roiling, boiling markets yet. Even so, they currently include:

• Passive RFID dream. As a replacement for bar codes, Walmart and others take delivery of pallets of Coca-Cola and Kleenex with passive tags (current cost ~$.10) that answer back when hit with radio waves at the door of the loading dock. Analytics engines sit behind the scenes to manage inventory and location.

• Active RFID dream. Picture a 50-acre facility for shipping containers, each with an active radio tag chirping about the contents of the container, or a hospital that can locate its defibrillators because they have little radios stuck to them. Once again the analytics engines are the brains of the bunch.

• Sensor network dream. Tiny network nodes, or smart dust, are dropped out of an airplane onto a battlefield. The nodes wake up when they hear human voices and self-organize into a mesh network that transmits surveillance. The landlord of a high-rise saves $.50/sq ft/month by distributing 50 temperature sensors per floor without pulling any wires.

• Home net dream. Whole-house audio and video, dueling game cubes, lighting control. Fun toys you’d like to have but don’t want to pay a lot for.

Watch out: dreams can turn to religion

Like Wi-Fi, next-gen weenie nets had better be really cheap, just good enough, and connected to something good. Beyond those key attributes, inventors are currently enamored with the following beliefs:

• Arbitrary topologies. When you throw surveillance sensors out of an airplane, you can’t predict where they are going to land, so next gen weenie net inventors believe they should support arbitrary topologies.

• Self-organizing behavior. Next-gen weenie net inventors believe the nets should be able to manage themselves without any central authority if necessary. If a central authority shows up, then the nodes should salute the flag, but until then they should be able to live on their own.

• Small. In addition to being low cost, weenie net elements should be small relative to the environment. The Star Trek communicator went from flip phone to badge, right?

• Always on. If they aren’t alive, what good are they?

• No maintenance. No tinkering and tuning, please. Especially, if I’ve got thousands or millions out there.

Like I said, I put these last attributes squarely in the category of belief systems. In the coming weeks and months, I will be writing about whether these matter or not — and how they fit as these technologies develop.