Femto cells – beyond the hype
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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