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back to article Cisco offers pint-size cell relief, lets mobile data spurt freely

Cisco CEO John Chambers has confirmed that it will start making cellular base stations, just not very big ones, with a view to integrating the cellular tech into Wi-Fi access points. The detail came out during a call with investors following the company's quarterly results, which showed increasing profit and revenue but …

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  1. bazza Silver badge

    New kid on the block?

    They certainly are.

    GSM operators have been fitting micro basestations everywhere for years, helped by the fact that GSM makes this relatively easy to do. For example there's one in almost every petrol station forecourt sign.

    3G makes it a lot harder to do this - one of the major cockups in both the UMTS and CDMA standards. 3G network planning is said to be really hard to get right.

    4G (LTE) apparently restores network planning to something like the simplicity of GSM, so it becomes easy to plonk 4G microcells everywhere. So I don't expect Cisco to be alone in this market, not by a long stretch...

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  2. JaitcH
    Thumb Up

    Has Ciso never checked TP-Link's catalog?

    TP-Link portable 3G/4G Wireless N Router, model TL-MR3020with wireless speeds up to 150Mbps.

    And the US Congress has never accused TP-Link of having back-doors.

    I have used TP's products for years with great success. A poorly kept secret is that you an boost WiFi transmitter output with software patches available on line!

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    1. Wanda Lust
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Re: Has Ciso never checked TP-Link's catalog?

      That item does it the wrong way round, it consumes rather than serves the 3G service. It doesn't even seem to include the 3G hardware.

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  3. AskOllie.com

    "...boost Wi-Fi transmitter output..." And potentially break the law. There is a limit of 100mW EIRP transmit power for 2.4GHz radio in the UK.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They're not solving the real problems

    Making a cheap and tiny transmitter is the easy part. The much more difficult problem is the "backhaul" and how you get that pipe connected into the rest of the network.

    Femtocells use your DSL/Cable connection, but that amounts to a fat-pipe radio connected to the world through a straw.

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