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Why every home should have one
Technology
Why every home should have one
Installing your very own cellphone base station may be the only way to ensure you can always get a line BEING forced to make cellphone calls from a cramped corner of his kitchen was not exactly Will Franks’s idea of the wireless nirvana we had all been promised. After all, a cellphone is meant to let you call from just about anywhere. But for most of the time the only place he could get a strong enough signal from his local cellphone base station was in that very awkward spot. “I knew there had to be a better way to improve coverage in people’s homes,” says Franks, a telecoms engineer. So he set about finding one. Franks’s company Ubiquisys, based in Swindon, UK, and a collection of like-minded hightech companies who had similar ideas at around the same time, now believe they have hit on the best way to guarantee people a decent mobile signal in their homes. If you can’t access the local base station, they say, why not bring the base station into your home? To do that, they have developed a gadget dubbed a “femtocell” – a miniature, lowpower, short-range cellphone base station and antenna that plug into your home broadband or cable line. Using a femtocell, any cellphone call you make at home connects not via the local 24 | NewScientist | 8 March 2008
mast but via the internet – from where it connects to the fixed and mobile telephone networks to complete your call. When you leave the house, however, the femtocell will seamlessly hand over the routing of your call to the local base station. At least, that’s the idea. Hitching your cellphone to a landline may sound like a peculiar notion. But working this way has a number of advantages beyond simply getting you a signal when HOME CALLS
Percentage of local calls from home that were made using cellphones in the US in 2006
18-24 year olds
68.8% 25-34 year olds
61.9% 35-44 year olds
47.8%
45-54 year olds
45.4%
55-64 year olds
41.8% 65 and older
29.2%
SOURCE: YANKEE GROUP
DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE
network congestion or local geography would otherwise make it tough. For instance, with a femtocell you can use a standard 2G or 3G cellphone to make cheap calls via the internet – you won’t need a special phone that connects to the broadband line via Wi-Fi. And a femtocell’s internet connections could also be the best way for people to cheaply download podcasts, music and video to capacious devices like the Apple iPhone. It certainly sounds promising – and the technology was very much the focus of the GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, last month – but critics wonder if the industry is trying to pull a fast one. Consumers are going to have to pay around $250 for the femtocell units and for much of the phone call via their broadband bill. So are consumers being asked to solve the industry’s coverage problems and foot the bill to boot? “It’s cheeky, but no consumer is going to do this unless they are going to get some benefit out of it,” says Franks. In any case, he says, some measures have to be taken to improve network coverage, which is waning in the face of a sea
change in the way we use cellphones. A steady move away from domestic landline telephones, particularly among younger people (see Graph) who have been brought up with mobiles glued to their ears, means base stations originally designed for ad hoc connections from people on the move are now in use much of the time by people at home. That means base stations are becoming swamped with calls. Even putting up more base stations may not make it easier to get a line. That’s because using a mobile phone at home places a disproportionate drain on a base station’s limited power resources – as the phone has to demand more power from the mast to get its signals to penetrate walls. And the increasing popularity of 3G phones is a problem because of their higher frequencies: the higher the frequency, the more signals are weakened by buildings and distances, says Franks. While inability to get a signal is a nuisance to users, it means megabucks down the drain for a phone network: poor home coverage is a major cause of “churn” – people switching networks. Routing voice and data traffic through a customer’s broadband line while they are at home should improve the level of service for mobile users outdoors by freeing up lines for them. What looks like a win-win situation has fuelled a recent rush to test, perfect and deploy femtocell technology. While some firms like Sprint in the US are rushing to market with heavily subsidised $50 femtocells now, most players, like Ubiquisys, the company that Franks co-founded, believe the technology is complex and needs extensive testing before it’s ready to go on sale. A femtocell comprises a mains-powered box the size of a paperback book that users plug into the broadband or cable router. But besides an antenna and the circuitry needed to handle 2G and 3G voice and data, these boxes are also likely to have www.newscientist.com
JOSON/ZEFAN/CORBIS
their own SIM cards, allowing them to make calls in their own right and send you alerts about your home and the people in it. For instance, when a child gets safely home from school and his phone is detected, the femtocell could send you a text to tell you he is home. Steve Mallinson, who runs ip.access, a femtocell company based in Cambridge, UK, says femtocells should make it possible to automatically and
cheaply download your favourite podcasts, music or video to a standard cellphone the moment you get home. He claims call clarity is much better than internet (VoIP) callers are used to with conventional Wi-Fi links to broadband. Compared to the phone antennas in a femtocell, the sensitivity of Wi-Fi antennas is very poor and easily disrupted by obstructions like walls, he says. Many of the benefits of femtocells are expected to centre
“When you leave home the femtocell will hand over the call to the local base station” www.newscientist.com
Battat, head of Massachusettsbased femtocell firm Airvana. This is technically onerous but the femtocell makers reckon that ongoing trials will prove the problem has been solved. Doing so is essential if customers are to be reassured that they are not paying too much for calls because they accidentally use the macrocell. Also being tested in the trials, which will finish towards the end of this year, is how smart these devices will have to be. If there are millions of the devices out there it will be impossible for the network to manage them all – so they will have to be self-aware. For example, if some of your neighbours install femtocells, your device will have to adjust its frequency to avoid interference. So, if the technology works, is it the end for the landline phone? John Carvalho, an engineer with O2 Europe, which is undertaking trials using Ubiquisys technology in the UK and the Czech Republic, thinks that, ironically, cellphones will become more dependent upon landlines because of the broadband connection that tends to be bundled in with them. “We won’t see femtocells killing the fixed lines,” he predicts. There is an elephant in the room for femtocell fans, however: the perceived risk to health from placing yet another source of microwaves in the home. With microwave ovens, bluetooth, –Overloaded with calls– cordless phones, today’s mobile networks and Wi-Fi, some worry on the provision of data to media- that we are already bathed in microwaves – so why add more? hungry gadgets like the iPhone – However, Ian Fogg of Jupiter assuming the technology works. Research in London says The technical challenges to the femtocells could reduce exposure engineers designing them are to cellphone radiation. By not greater than simply creating a forcing a phone used indoors to low-powered version of a boost its power to reach the conventional base station (or distant mast through the walls, “macrocell”) for the living room. the femtocell allows the phone to For example, to protect the work at reduced power. That security of your call, secure means less exposure and better internet gateways have had to be created to relay the voice and data battery life, too. But persuading people to put a base station in traffic via the broadband line. their living room won’t be easy. “Also, how do you make sure the “It’s a touchy subject,” he says. indoor handset locks on to the “I think it’s going to need very nearby femtocell, rather than the careful marketing.” ● outdoor macrocell?” asks Randy 8 March 2008 | NewScientist | 25
Why every home should have one
Installing your very own cellphone base station may be the only way to ensure you can always get a line BEING forced to make cellphone calls from a cramped corner of his kitchen was not exactly Will Franks’s idea of the wireless nirvana we had all been promised. After all, a cellphone is meant to let you call from just about anywhere. But for most of the time the only place he could get a strong enough signal from his local cellphone base station was in that very awkward spot. “I knew there had to be a better way to improve coverage in people’s homes,” says Franks, a telecoms engineer. So he set about finding one. Franks’s company Ubiquisys, based in Swindon, UK, and a collection of like-minded hightech companies who had similar ideas at around the same time, now believe they have hit on the best way to guarantee people a decent mobile signal in their homes. If you can’t access the local base station, they say, why not bring the base station into your home? To do that, they have developed a gadget dubbed a “femtocell” – a miniature, lowpower, short-range cellphone base station and antenna that plug into your home broadband or cable line. Using a femtocell, any cellphone call you make at home connects not via the local 24 | NewScientist | 8 March 2008
mast but via the internet – from where it connects to the fixed and mobile telephone networks to complete your call. When you leave the house, however, the femtocell will seamlessly hand over the routing of your call to the local base station. At least, that’s the idea. Hitching your cellphone to a landline may sound like a peculiar notion. But working this way has a number of advantages beyond simply getting you a signal when HOME CALLS
Percentage of local calls from home that were made using cellphones in the US in 2006
18-24 year olds
68.8% 25-34 year olds
61.9% 35-44 year olds
47.8%
45-54 year olds
45.4%
55-64 year olds
41.8% 65 and older
29.2%
SOURCE: YANKEE GROUP
DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE
network congestion or local geography would otherwise make it tough. For instance, with a femtocell you can use a standard 2G or 3G cellphone to make cheap calls via the internet – you won’t need a special phone that connects to the broadband line via Wi-Fi. And a femtocell’s internet connections could also be the best way for people to cheaply download podcasts, music and video to capacious devices like the Apple iPhone. It certainly sounds promising – and the technology was very much the focus of the GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, last month – but critics wonder if the industry is trying to pull a fast one. Consumers are going to have to pay around $250 for the femtocell units and for much of the phone call via their broadband bill. So are consumers being asked to solve the industry’s coverage problems and foot the bill to boot? “It’s cheeky, but no consumer is going to do this unless they are going to get some benefit out of it,” says Franks. In any case, he says, some measures have to be taken to improve network coverage, which is waning in the face of a sea
change in the way we use cellphones. A steady move away from domestic landline telephones, particularly among younger people (see Graph) who have been brought up with mobiles glued to their ears, means base stations originally designed for ad hoc connections from people on the move are now in use much of the time by people at home. That means base stations are becoming swamped with calls. Even putting up more base stations may not make it easier to get a line. That’s because using a mobile phone at home places a disproportionate drain on a base station’s limited power resources – as the phone has to demand more power from the mast to get its signals to penetrate walls. And the increasing popularity of 3G phones is a problem because of their higher frequencies: the higher the frequency, the more signals are weakened by buildings and distances, says Franks. While inability to get a signal is a nuisance to users, it means megabucks down the drain for a phone network: poor home coverage is a major cause of “churn” – people switching networks. Routing voice and data traffic through a customer’s broadband line while they are at home should improve the level of service for mobile users outdoors by freeing up lines for them. What looks like a win-win situation has fuelled a recent rush to test, perfect and deploy femtocell technology. While some firms like Sprint in the US are rushing to market with heavily subsidised $50 femtocells now, most players, like Ubiquisys, the company that Franks co-founded, believe the technology is complex and needs extensive testing before it’s ready to go on sale. A femtocell comprises a mains-powered box the size of a paperback book that users plug into the broadband or cable router. But besides an antenna and the circuitry needed to handle 2G and 3G voice and data, these boxes are also likely to have www.newscientist.com
JOSON/ZEFAN/CORBIS
their own SIM cards, allowing them to make calls in their own right and send you alerts about your home and the people in it. For instance, when a child gets safely home from school and his phone is detected, the femtocell could send you a text to tell you he is home. Steve Mallinson, who runs ip.access, a femtocell company based in Cambridge, UK, says femtocells should make it possible to automatically and
cheaply download your favourite podcasts, music or video to a standard cellphone the moment you get home. He claims call clarity is much better than internet (VoIP) callers are used to with conventional Wi-Fi links to broadband. Compared to the phone antennas in a femtocell, the sensitivity of Wi-Fi antennas is very poor and easily disrupted by obstructions like walls, he says. Many of the benefits of femtocells are expected to centre
“When you leave home the femtocell will hand over the call to the local base station” www.newscientist.com
Battat, head of Massachusettsbased femtocell firm Airvana. This is technically onerous but the femtocell makers reckon that ongoing trials will prove the problem has been solved. Doing so is essential if customers are to be reassured that they are not paying too much for calls because they accidentally use the macrocell. Also being tested in the trials, which will finish towards the end of this year, is how smart these devices will have to be. If there are millions of the devices out there it will be impossible for the network to manage them all – so they will have to be self-aware. For example, if some of your neighbours install femtocells, your device will have to adjust its frequency to avoid interference. So, if the technology works, is it the end for the landline phone? John Carvalho, an engineer with O2 Europe, which is undertaking trials using Ubiquisys technology in the UK and the Czech Republic, thinks that, ironically, cellphones will become more dependent upon landlines because of the broadband connection that tends to be bundled in with them. “We won’t see femtocells killing the fixed lines,” he predicts. There is an elephant in the room for femtocell fans, however: the perceived risk to health from placing yet another source of microwaves in the home. With microwave ovens, bluetooth, –Overloaded with calls– cordless phones, today’s mobile networks and Wi-Fi, some worry on the provision of data to media- that we are already bathed in microwaves – so why add more? hungry gadgets like the iPhone – However, Ian Fogg of Jupiter assuming the technology works. Research in London says The technical challenges to the femtocells could reduce exposure engineers designing them are to cellphone radiation. By not greater than simply creating a forcing a phone used indoors to low-powered version of a boost its power to reach the conventional base station (or distant mast through the walls, “macrocell”) for the living room. the femtocell allows the phone to For example, to protect the work at reduced power. That security of your call, secure means less exposure and better internet gateways have had to be created to relay the voice and data battery life, too. But persuading people to put a base station in traffic via the broadband line. their living room won’t be easy. “Also, how do you make sure the “It’s a touchy subject,” he says. indoor handset locks on to the “I think it’s going to need very nearby femtocell, rather than the careful marketing.” ● outdoor macrocell?” asks Randy 8 March 2008 | NewScientist | 25