Vodafone Access Gateway 3G

Erm right

So Voda want us to use our Broadband/Electricty/Space for them to expand there network....

Then bill us for it lol.

Wonder whos dumb enough to take up this offer..

on the plus side you could use it to use them radio waves to warm up your bacon sarnie...

Outrageous!

"no discount on calls made over your femtocell, and data usage counts against your fair-use cap in the usual way"

At the LEAST, data routed through the femtocell should be exempt from the "f-u too" cap, upstream data backhaul isn't my problem.

Or...

...you could just use a WiFi access point and use your mobile to make SIP calls over that, like some of us have been doing for years. Another case of re-inventing the wheel, surely. Of course, if Apple marketed it, everybody would think it's something new and really clever that had never been done before.

I think I'll pass

I think I'll pass on this to be honest. I have patchy Vodafone 3G reception in my area, but I only have a Vodafone 3G modem (my mobile is on Three, also with poor 3G reception).

As much as I like the idea of these things, I certainly wouldn't want to pay £160 or so for one, then not have a discount on calls and data.

As it is, I dare say it won't be that popular. Offer a discount on calls and cut the price, then I'd be more interested. In the mean time I'll continue to use the wifi on my phone and notebook when I'm home.

Rob

Google Voice

Seems to me that you have this choice:

1. Pay £160 or £15/month to use your cellphone somewhere in range of your broadband connection, for which you're already paying.

2. Get a free Google Voice account, and then use that to make calls from your computer that look exactly as if you were talking on your cellphone to the person at the other end of the call.

Hmmm, no-brainer.

I guess the interesting thing will be when somebody links up a 3G card on (say) Orange, uses it to provide an ad-hoc wireless broadband connection to a local PC, and then connects one of these jobbies to it, so effectively providing Vodafone cellphone coverage using Orange's 3G network.

:)

Nice idea

It's just a shame that they so often don't work!

I've got one at home and one in my office and frequently have to turn the thing off to actually have a working mobile. The Vodafone forums have quite a few similar comments so mine isn't an isolated case.

Just this morning I turned on my Blackberry and had a nice full strength 3G signal but I couldn't make/receive calls or emails. Vodafone tell me to 'turn it off and on again' which is hardly ideal.

Not strictly double paying??

I must admit, I'm not 100% certain how the femtocell works for data traffic but I would have thought the femotcell device creates a tunnel back to vodafone and that the data/internet access breaks out from their. If this is the case, then you would be using vodafone's bandwidth (as well as your own) and hence it would make sense that the data traffic is allocated from your fair-use allowance. If a tunnel is not created and the internet access broke out from your own broadband directly to the internet, then I do not see how they would know how much data you have used. Just a thought.

Blatant rip off

So, instead of using the 3g network that you have paid for, you just use your own internet connection for data and it still comes out of your bundle.

And it costs £15 a month?

And this is for real?

And they do realise that most 3g phones have built in wireless?

Please, forgive me if I don't cut my own arm off...

Femtos? Where's the market?

Handover from the macro network to femtocell was never going to happen as the macro NodeB doesn't know about the femto.

So what exactly is the market for femtocells? People who live in caves, ie don’t have acceptable voice coverage? Well there aren’t many of them!

People with dongles wanting data access? If the femto is connected to a broadband line, why on earth would anyone choose to use the 3G protocol stack instead of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is the right technology for wireless distribution in a building, not UMTS.

A femtocell for free and discounted calls? How does that work when femtocell hardware costs as much as a handset, especially when considering the additional hardware needed in the network to aggregate thousands of them and the inevitable calls to customer services. There are quality issues as well, Vodafone's customer experience becomes dependent on a 3rd party's provision of backhaul transmission. This might be rubbish and therefore reflect badly on Vodafone.

For voice, the 2G and 3G network’s coverage is good enough. For high speed data, Wi-Fi is a better technology than femtocells.

hang on..

If your out in the stix with no mobile signal what are the odds your going to have a half decent net connection. Kind off a big maybe

Catch 22?

If you need a VAG, then you probably won't have good enough broadband to *have* a VAG.

About the only real use (enough to justify the £160 outlay) would be to provide fast data access to 3G handsets that *don't* have WiFi. Even then its probably going to be cheaper to change handset.

A solution looking for a problem, IMHO.

Re: Obvious extention

Hmm, been at the telco kool-aid have we? Just 'cos they colour a bit of the map with the hue that means 100% coverage, doesn't mean you can actually get a signal in all of it.

I used to live in an area which was one of the smog-covered bits you're referring to. I ended up dumping the company mobile (Orange) as standing on a ladder at the end of the garden to use the thing wasn't filling me with joy.

Orange's response every time we raised this (several times, I was doing on-call support and the helpdesk drones objected to resorting to landlines) was to peddle the mantra that they had full coverage in the Greater London area. A platitude that was demonstrably a vile damned pile of complete porkies.

Where's the T-Mobile one

I wish T-Mobile would launch one on there network - I live in one of our core cities urban areas (i.e. Nottingham) and get just enough signal indoors for the phone to ring, but not enough to maintain a conversation, and standing outside in the cold and wet to make a voice call is not fun! (and switching to another network is not an option - only T-Mobile and Three appear on a network scan, but all the networks appear when in the garden - T-Mobile annoyingly with 5bars and HSDPA!)

Being inside Nottingham's urban area means I get decent ASDL coverage (18mbps from Be*) though so could easily use that for piggy backing on - Indeed I conserve the battery life on the phone by using WiFi and letting the RSS, Podcasts, and ActiveSync connections run over Wifi!

Not that Wifi is a brilliant solution as coverage inside is rather patchy.

Then again, perhaps a Femtocell with the ability to connect to an external UMTS aerial would be a better solution for many on the edge of network coverage! (i.e. uses the Mobile network rather than ADSL)

@Pav Lucistnik

"Does it mean that if this femto cell is installed in the place with existing macro coverage, unregistered handsets are actually worse off, because the femto will wipe out the weak signal from the macro cell and the handset will be left cold in the waters?"

This is a distinct possibility if the femtos are not located ideally, the link below outlines the potential femto 'dead zone' for example :-

http://www.mobilehandsetdesignline.com/howto/206902713

A few corrections & comments

Alert as several people have missed important facts

First, it isn't £15 a month extra monthly bill. It never was.

It is free, thrown in as a bundle with a lot of new contracts. Or you can pay £160 up-front, or you can pay £120 spread over a 12 or 24 month contract eg £5/month. (I know... its usually "discount for cash" not a premium but there you go).

Or if you are a high-value customer you get one for free just for asking. Go on... see how much they love you.

The box can't travel or be used for cheap roaming. They have to track the location, not least because you could take it on holiday to a place Voda doesn't have license & isn't allowed to transmit (eg USA on different frequency).

There are some weird regulatory issues which why data traffic can't just go direct from your router to the Internet but must go via their core: lawful intercept, RIPA or the way the cellular carriers try to block teens from accessing porn. Legally they are the 3G service provider to your smartphone so they have to be able to monitor the traffic. Dumb maybe ("what about WiFi then...?"), but blame lawyers/politicians rather than Voda.

Finally, people who complain about the cost or having to pay for it.... So don't buy one. Very easy.

I object to paying £££ to Sky so I get the privilege to watch programs with ads in that other people paid for. So I don't pay for Sky.

At least Voda offer the choice: would you prefer they charged every subscriber extra tax to build a network to deliver service to the people who can't get coverage...??

Broadband in the stix..

Hmmm. Don't assume that people that live in rural areas with NO mobile coverage from any network (big granite hills do tend to block signals for some reason....) don't get decent broadband - we don't have any signal, but live less than a mile away from the local exchange and get a decent 6.5M connection. Now, if you want my business mr vodafone (or any other company) you'll discount the calls I make using the femtocell (remember, the telco will still have to pay termination fees to the ongoing network)