3G base stations in your home?
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?
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