Why would anyone run their own base station?

a fine idea.......

except there is no such thing as a unlimited data tarrif, they sell them, but they are not unlimited.

Pint, cause it's friday.

Seriously?

Both myself and my wife have unlimited Vodafone data traffis through our works, and I can say very easily that when we get home or at work we use the wireless links as they are faster. I wouldn't go swapping my WiFi for a GPRS even if they gave me the base station, its just too slow, why would I use that link and add to that by increasing the latancy by putting Vodafone in my broadband link?

The only reason I would agree, is to, as you suggest run a VPN tunnel from somewhere foreign.

Garden Walled?

So, to give me the net on my phone I can get a picocell from Vodafone, which won't work unless I already have internet connectivity?

Ya

Good luck with that.

But....

......it still doesnt answer why I should pay £160.00 to improve 3G performance for my neighbours when I don't get my traffic priortised, make any money from it, get a discount on my bill from it or do the normal stuff I can do on a WIFI connection like browse NAS units or print to a wireless printer.

It is an already dead technology as it requires that you already have 1meg minimum and stump up some cash. If I had to use 3g it would be because I either can't get >2meg or I was out and about and this helps with neither.

Am I missing something here?

So the only benefit is power saving on your mobile phone? Which is at home... plugged into the charger.... for £160... let me get back to you on that.

I think i'm missing something!

The article refers to 'not paying for data twice'. I don't see how this can be avoided currently. Am i missing something?

Data charge 1: Broadband connection

Data charge 2: Mobile phone

Femto Cell connects to network through broadband connection. No matter what happens the data still has to travel down your broadband connection.

Why would I want to use 3G for internet access in my own home? It’s just not fast enough! I’ll use my laptop and Wi-Fi please… if it wasn’t so convenient, I’d still use Ethernet.

I'd have thought the biggest advantage of this is being able to get a mobile signal in your house.

I may soon find my self having to live in a house where i have zero coverage (cheers orange), but with 12 months left on my contract.

Also, if your going to stay with someone where you know you'll have trouble with signal, take the thing along and plug into their router.

It's a shame this article is making a case for the removal of Wi-Fi... if you had Wi-Fi enabled ones business people could take them on road trips. There have been many a time i've been in the backend of no where, in a hotel with Wi-Fi but no mobile signal.

Coverage

Surely it would be easier just to use WiFi for the connection?

But the home LAN has many advantages...

I quite like having a home LAN that is mostly secured from the outside world where I can share music around my devices and have my xbox talk with my pc talk with my laptop talk with my hifi without having to do weird negotiation with the outside world or having to VPN between them. Just saying.

Articles for the sake of articles is bad editorial. What is this, digg?

Rubbish

"To which the answer is: to replace the Wi-Fi network you're already running."

What complete crap. Utterly bile. This product has *NOTHING* to do with data; does the author remember what a *phone* is?

The purpose of this technology is very simple - it appeals to people who don't get even coverage throughout their home. If you've got nice thick walls, and don't get coverage in certain rooms then this technology means that you can fix things so that when you go into the kitchen, or wherever, then you don't miss all your calls to voicemail. No more having to leave the phone on the windowsill to receive calls, no more sitting by the window because the sofa is out of coverage. Simple.

Too many flaws

Far too many to make moving away from my WiFi router connected to my landline broadband. If T-Mobile wnet down this route you'd get a worse off surfing experience, by default using your latptop on their 3G means you go through their proxy which downgrades all images/graphics to a lower quality, for obvious reasons but not something I want experience on a continual basis.

The other overiding factor being I have a home network with 3/4 machines on it for a reason, so counts me out, I'm sure this might be a good option for a single Mac user, they'd be willing to pay the money twice over for less of an experience.

how does this work exactly?

They sell you a 3G micro-range transmitter which connects to what, your broadband, to transmit signal on? Or does it somehow connect to the nearest tower, gaining signal strength by using some means that can't be put in handsets? If the latter, why not? If the former, why?

Either way I guess it could be useful if it uses a licensed frequency as it will get rid of the interference. But bandwidth will be lousy - at best a tenth of wifi - so I can't see takeup for data purposes. After using wifi, my 3G modem seems pitifully slow.

and what is this "unlimited data tariff" of which you speak? Maybe if your'e on the £100 pcm packages.... I'm on PAYG...

Better batteries needed...

"These days we tend to shut down our laptops when we're moving, but the next generation of devices will want to remain connected more continuously"

Not on current battery tech, we don't. Nor on any battery tech likely to come out in the next, say, 5 years, which is when this femto cell stuff is supposed to be happening.

What you pay for.....

So, let me get this straight, you have broadband, a 3g data plan and you then add a femtocell.

All so you can avoid having to switch a connection when you leave the house with a laptop/netbook/phonethingymajig.

Oh, and other people may be using your femtocell, and thereby your broadband.......

Not an issue for me when I move to Sweden and have 100mb full duplex broadband, but I get a max 512k up in the UK atm, so that's only a couple of calls being routed before I seriously have issues doing anything with my connection.

So, does having my own femtocell mean my 3g data plan becomes unlimited when using said femtocell or do I still get the pathetic 5gb limit before I have to start hocking my soul to cover the 'reasonable' data charges once I go over that?

Though I have to admit, taking it to Sweden with me is sounding fairly attractive, as I already have a vpn server...... Hope the neighbours wont mind.

Paris, 'cos I'm pretty sure she doesn't mind using someone else's phat pipe......

Coverage

How does this work for other networks? Would my 02 phone treat this cell as any other?

I don't agree with the article in terms of an end to WIFI, at least not in the short to medium term. My own priority is getting any kind of reception for voice and data out here in the sticks.

£160 is well worth the money in my case. I don't know about others.

More reason to use ECM's on unwanted AP's

And its more fun watching BT run about next door trying to work out why....

all they can get is <No-Fi> with the new install they are doing :)

REMEMBER KIDS JUST SAY NO!.... TO WiFi!!!!

Mines the one with.....

Tinfoil lineing with lots of little antenna' on the back radiating noise at 2.4-2.5

I love my Femto

I have had a trial Femto unit for several months and would not part with it for all the tea in China.

Firstly something people havent mentioned is that the battery life on your mobile is much better with a femto in the house... Simply your phone doesnt keep hunting for new signals and tunes its power down to suit the femto.

Now Im at home I get crystal clear phone calls, and high speed data making the phone apps far more usable. In fact on both my N95 and iPhone data via Femto 3G is quicker than using wifi - and far more reliable as I walk from room to room. This isnt just a one liner, one of the reasons I have the unit is so I can test througput for both modes.

Someone here mentions why that other people could logon to your Femto and take your broadband - well its up to you whether you allow them on or not.

If you got a flat tariff plan I just dont see the reason why you wouldnt get one, they are amazing and compliment wifi rather than compete.

Cheers - Happy Femto User from Glos

Poor 3G in good broadband areas?

Right, phone on desk here, full 3G signal... at home full 3G... in fact almost anywhere I go 3G is pretty ubiquitous. The only exception is my mothers in a rural part of the country and that's so far from the phone exchange the broadband is even worse.

I guess this would be most use if instead of using broadband backhaul, it could take a Vodafone 3G dongle as it's internet connection..... oh wait.... I see what they did there.

Still, might be some use hung out of an upstairs window connected to a 3G router.

160 quid

... there is no way of getting around the fact that this costs 160 quid for tenous benefits especially when you take out the ignorance of the reporter talking of "Unlimited" data packages... just where have you been for the last 5 years and why haven't you seen ALL the reg articles about exactly this issue.

Rubbish

If you use 3G for the laptop you have a max speed of 7.2Mbps.

If you use WiFi the Max Speed is over 100Mbps.

The WiFi is definitely free to your own LAN and no extra on Broadband. Can you say the same of 3G?

The latency of WiFi here is < 2ms. The minimum latency of 3G to your own broadband router is over 70ms

There is NO good reason to get one of these other than you have poor or no coverage on a 3G only device.

"making the world your hotspot"

Nope, I don't get it. Why would I want to take my nice, solid 8meg connection and then plug a box into it so I could connect to it using something that can currently get to somewhere a shade over 7meg, assuming the wind's in the right direction and the portents auger well?

Oh, and that 8meg connection has unlimited data use rather than "unlimited" data use.

Never mind that I might want to talk to something else on my own network, which runs at speeds somewhere considerably north of the wildest dreams of 3G.

I'm sure that some of these will get installed, in exactly the same way that I'm sure that there are sad beggars out there who reckon that the line "I've got a femtocell" is so likely to snap knicker elastic that it's worth 160 quid.

This is for voice!

I have a very poor Vodafone signal at home so using my phone for voice calls is very difficult. I'm on call once a month, this will mean that I won't have to leave my phone balanced on the windowsill and will actually be able to take calls and talk to lusers properly.

I'll be getting one.

Vodafone write that???

you may not have to pay twice for your data, but you will certainly have to pay once, once at vodafone's mobile data rate when the data is travelling over your own connection. I can't imagine anything more annoying.

This is just what i need

Why do you most of you think it's for data? I will have one of these as soon as i can get one. Why? Because i live in the middle of nowhere, mobile coverage is poor on all the networks, but my Vodafone just about copes, i miss lots of calls because of the patchy coverage (therefore i miss potential business) but i do have a 5.5Mbps broadband connection. This femtocell will mean i dont miss any more incoming calls. That's why it is an excellent thing and i want one.

Andrew Hurdle

You may have tested them, but you're on the pay role. Bugger off!

"Firstly something people havent mentioned is that the battery life on your mobile is much better with a femto in the house"

Your in the house... who cares... plug it in!

"Now Im at home I get crystal clear phone calls, and high speed data making the phone apps far more usable."

Clear phone call's ill give you. That's the only bonus i see from these devices.

Phone apps??? turn on you PC/Mac/laptop/netbook

"In fact on both my N95 and iPhone data via Femto 3G is quicker than using wifi"

How is that when you rely on the very same source of data (broadband connection)? If your phone is accessing data faster on 3g than Wi-Fi, look for a different handset. Then stop being a tool and use a computer because just like the charging issue... YOUR AT HOME!

@Dave 142

"I think you can get something else that lets you use the phone indoors, I can't remember, but I think they're called landlines and use wires."

Yes genius well done. Provided you tell anyone planning on calling on your mobile to call back on the land line. Something I have to do just about every time. If you are lucky enough to have enough reception to get the call through.

I would happily pay £160 to get consistant quality calls.

I would have bought one of these

Before I left the UK last year, I was living in a flat that had dodgy Vodafone coverage. I had had a Vodafone phone since 1995, and was perfectly happy with the service I had. Unfortunately, the reception was unusable in my flat, so I switched to T-Mobile. And for those people (like Dave 142) who ask about landlines, I like to give me friends (and work colleagues for that matter) a single number on which to contact me. Because I give out that number, I know that any call to my landline is spam, so I leave the ringer off. All the landline got used for was broadband connectivity and phoning out for takeaways.

These days my landline has 1 extra use. My Skype number (which is the number I give to everyone still in the UK) calls both my mobile and my landline. So I only answer the landline if my mobile is ringing at the same time.

Slight problem

Emergency service location is based on IP address.

In my case the IP address is listed as assigned to a router in Fareham which is owned by my ISP and is a good 200 miles south of me so thats not gonna work is it.

WI-FI, 3G is rubbish for data transfer anyway so the only benefit would be phone coverage and I would be paying twice as I use a decent non mass market ISP that invests in its network, not like your <insert ISP name here> of this world that overtax their hardware and upstream connections and then introduce traffic management to cripple what customers can do with a connection they are paying a good amount of their hard earned for.

Bullshit.

That's what that is.

simples

Start letting people use their 3g signals more usefully over the existing infrastructure, like tethering to use your "unlimited data plan" without additional fees of £10 or more - also stop putting pressure on mobile app stores to not approve applications that use high bandwidths and we might get so used to using 3g that we will want it in the home.

Infact (and I'm looking at tmobile, orange and o2 here) stop treating us like money-secreting meat sacks - and we may just decide to start using your hardware in our homes to further your network coverage...

<dodgy_analogy>

Right now, it just feels like a bus company asking you to pay them to drive your own car on public roads - but only along their specified bus routes at the designated times.

</dodgy_analogy>

EM exposure

Wonder when we'll start growing cauliflowers on our heads due to all the EM in the air. I don't think that day is too far off.

I think that there will be enough energy "in the air" to charge all my devices' batteries!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_charging

I am sure someone somewhere has thought of this...

Great advert for Vodaphone, but....

its not really ubiquitous if it relies on every indoor / underground building or rural area all having specialised equipment and an existing (non ubiquitous) broadband connection that uses - your words here - messy things like IP addresses (gasp!) AND private individuals and businesses alike will be paying twice for the pleasure.

Behave.

Effective and standards compliant transmission and receipt of data to and from a user is the network operator's problem and responsibility, not ours.

If Vodaphone are convinced that this is the way toward a seamless future network, then they should be picking up the tab.

Its yet another fragmented vendor-locked-in solution to a problem that is better addressed by the industry as a whole.

</rant>

Brilliant Idea

This sounds like a brilliant idea FOR VODAFONE !

They'll be able to claim better coverage to prospective customers and instead of having to spend money to get that coverage, they'll make money. £160 for every little bit of extra coverage and that's not counting the extra they'll save by not having to increase the infrastructure costs to carry the calls and data. The customers will be paying both Vodafone and their ISP for that.

Well done Vodafone for a stunningly good business proposition, for yourselves.

To anyone else who takes them up on this I hope it's because no carrier covers where you live at all or you're using it from another country via VPN to keep your calls routed through the UK; otherwise you're an idiot !

so let's get this straight

If I use my PAYG mobile to surf the internet via the femtocell will I still get charged ? If I make voice calls I'll still get charged ? Yes? Thought so. They can get stuffed.

Someone get this author out of here

802.11g is faster, bridges directly to my home LAN (so I can use it for, oh, streaming media, etc.), and doesn't require an ongoing contract with a mobile provider.

I think I'll keep using the right tool for the job, thank you.

-d

Eh? What? When?

Is this a solution without a problem?

Wat, no phone jacks?

Why would anyone use a mobile phone at home when there's a perfectly good (read: dirt cheap) alternative sticking out of the wall? It seems like a hell of a lot better option than a mobile phone company providing poor service then charging customers extra to make it reliable.

Drivel

If there's a coherent argument anywhere in this article, I missed it. As long as I've got a wired router in my house already, why the **** would I want to involve Vodafone's switches (and tariffs) in my home network (internal and internet) ?

Of the Operator, By the Operator, FOR THE OPERATOR

El Reg, I don't think I will see your articles in the same light again. Opinions can be anything, but dammit the facts have to be right! As an engineer who does work with WiFi and 3G radios, this article is so hopeless flawed, it's woeful.

I don't think Mr Ray fully understands the technical aspects of mobile vs wireless communication and voice vs data calls and seem to club all of them together.

Fact 1: WLAN consumes less power than 3G. A quick google check Mr Ray should have done. http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3036&p=3 Also, arguably by design, the latency on a 3G is more.

Fact 2: Consumer grade internet based services should not be used for emergency services. Relying on a internet connection for that is a bad idea, as Skype happily warns you about.

Fact 3: This is a big advantage for the operator, as their biggest fear is that users will eventually switch to VoIP services on their mobiles, making all their minutes and contracts moot. They want you to stick to GSM voice calls, and 3G/4G for your data and this is a cheap way of keeping themselves relevant.

3G uses a lot more power than your home Wifi. To put in perspective, 3G is around 150 mW, WiFi is 30 mW! Power will be dropped for femtocells making them interference prone too.

Other than the isolated cases of no coverage, for the consumer use case, there is only one useful feature. The femtocell should be able to *perfectly* switch you from GSM/3G to WiFi, with some help from your phone. For eg if you are on a VOICE call the femtocell knows both the backend connection to the operator as well as the WiFi connection and can do the perfect seamless switch. Personally i wouldn't pay £160 for that.

I can see businesses using this, with bulk minute deals from the operator for all the employees, and a £160 box to provide perfect coverage in the office, with maybe some phone extension routing too.

For me as a consumer, it's either a free box, or one *FRICKING* good plan to go with the £160.

Paris, coz she likes all the coverage she can get..

Too Many Questions

This is of great benefit ... to Vodafone - they get their network expanded at your expense. And they need to ... 3G : Always on, Sometimes connected.

They want ubiquitous 3G and this is a cheap way to get it. Since the connection is over your broadband; can you prevent someone else using your cell ? Is the broadband call datastream interceptible by you? [i.e can you listen in or monitor it ?] Or will they be running an encrypted connection over your network and broadband ? Will their connection be dynamically allocated or do they take a fixed slice of your broadband ? What about when you want to download a lot of data, will they be gobbling up your connection? If your cell is very busy, will your ISP be throttling you back ?

The cellphone companies are storing all kinds of data on calls [dates, times, cells etc.] so any dodgy calls or data going via your cell may implicate you. [Police raid at 4.00 in the morning anyone?]

How many simultaneous calls will these things support ? [probably 1, 2 or 4] You won't have any priority, so youll be pretty annoyed that you are paying for this and the rest of your neighbourhood is benefitting and you can't get on!

Will there be a contract, and do you have to guarantee to have this for, say 3 years. If you are in the sticks and the power is iffy, is there battery back up for this or is it no mains = no signal. Will you have to agree to have your broadband modem on all the time?

This is only scratching the surface; there will be lots of other questions but I'll have to do some more thinking [and it's Saturday and it's too hot so I can't be bothered right now! ]

I'm done here. I'll get my jacket - it's the one with the worn brown leather patches on the elbows.

I'm Tempted....

I live in Dubai, my router is always connected over VPN to my company office in the UK. Helps me get around the Internet Blocks here in Dubai. Its expensive to call my family and freinds in the UK and for them to call me.

One 30 minute phone call to a Landline in the UK using my Vodafone UK mobile cost me 40 quid.

I'm tempted to get one of these and enjoy my 750 free minutes and unlimited texts, and let my freinds and family call me when ever the want... Would save me a fortune at times.

A few truthes......

Lets dispell some myths and nip some rumours in the bud -

The femtocell connects to Vodafone using an IPSec tunnel so nobody will be able to intercept and listen in to your conversations over the femtocell. Also you configure it to accept connections from up to 32 numbers, any 4 of which can use the device at the same time. If someone isn't listed in your router they can't use it so nobody unauthorised will be chewing up any bandwidth.

You can't use it outside the UK as it registers the location, devices in the USA use GPS - quite how they are doing it in the UK I don't know but there will be some technical wizardry stopping it's use all over the world.

Lastly it's not meant to replace wi-fi, the frequency 3G runs at isn't the best at penetrating buildings......hence why it's been dreamed up. It's available as part of a contract so you don't have to shell out 160 notes for it, you can get one with your upgrade. Calls will be charged as you are still using the Vodafone core network and all the equipment like the authentication servers, SGSN's, Media Gateways, to name a few.

I guess I will come back and correct some more myths and misconceptions another time, it's too warm to do it now.

A battery back up won't be much use, if your power is out then your broadband router won't have any power either so no connection to the internet equals no femtocell.

FUD

For those that haven't read else where:

1) as others have noted, it provides short range in-building (yours) coverage - good for areas that don't already have it

2) only registered handsets will be able to connect to your femtocell; thus it doesn't change the /public/ coverage of the network

3) it required DSL backhaul that you provide - if you really do live in the sticks and are stll using 56kbps dialup, this isn't for you

4) yes, if you have wifi already, then your work laptop is probably going to work much better on a direct wifi connection instead of tunelling 3G over wifi. I really don't think this is goal here (which the article seems to suggest)