Cisco gobbles UK mobe mast maker - you know where this is going Swindon-based Ubiquisys will soon be part of Cisco in a $310m (£205m) buyout. The networking colossus has, in effect, snapped up more than 50 customers wanting small cellular base stations and the technology they want. Cisco will hand over cash and "retention-based incentives" to persuade key staff at the Brit biz to stay on. …
I thought they were something to do with Ubiquiti which worried me for a bit.
(I think Ubiquiti will be bought soon their new routers like the EdgeRouter lite are far too decent for the cost at least as far as the legacy router vendors will be concerned (Be like IBM buying Transistive just to disband it knowing that their technology will likely cost them huge sums if not dealt with.)
Colo with 2 edge router lites (Failover also running samba 4.0 (It can use Debian mipsel packages if needed).
Hyperv Server 2012 on 2 boxes. Pretty good setup to sell VPS's from or whatever no Microsoft Costs - fully working simple live migration.
As far as I am concerned if I am running a base station as a benefit to the telco there is no way I should be paying to send calls / data through it.
You may laugh, but it's fast becoming a reality, one way of establishing and maintaining entanglement - the linking of two separate particles - is by using the standard principle of 'boosting' and femtocells essentially harness frequency by attaching themselves to it, so the signal is captured and stabilised it before it is then boosted for local use where signals aren't readily available. If the same principle can be applied to send and receive quantum bites of information, known as 'qubits', over vast distances, teleportation computing may arrive sooner than we think. It is already possible to encode/decode or disassemble/reassemble or encrypt/decrypt so with the Higgs' boson discovery as well as the neutrinos acceleration to light speed, it really is just a case of putting all these ingredients together soi that we can all finally say "beam me up!"
I'm posting as "anon" simply not to give the game away......
Femto's or small cells is a market but as the article suggests "It's not hard to imagine that the business is exploding" is not at all accurate.
A quick trawl around the market pages will tell you that one company mentioned here, IP Access, one of the larger femto suppliers has revenues of around £35 million. This is not a big market.
There are two or three main issues with femto's.
The main being that the device still needs to connect to a mobile network. Without that, it is pretty pointless. Carrying the backhaul over a broadband network is also an issue as this increases the complexity of fault diagnosis when the subscriber is having issues. They are paying for the same service twice, once in their mobile service once in their broadband subs.
Yes, the network listen feature is useful, so it does not interfere with the local macro, but if there is macro, there is little need for a femto. OK, it might be useful to have coverage in the basement, but this is not a major market.
Most femto's also have a small number of active connections, often single digits, some low double digits, so this rules them out of the "shopping centre" arena. But then again, if you were, say, O2 then "proper" macro cells provide a much better solution to a the shopping centre than femto's, with their limited range and power output.
No, for me the only reason Cisco buight Uby' is becuase now they own [practically speaking] the two main femto players, Uby and IP Access.
Ericsson do not have a femto solution, although they have macro small / pico cells, the Chinese stopped their offereing last year, Alu' have never really made in roads and NSN have other issues to focus on.
No, the future is not femto's, but bigger, better, properly mapped macros......
Never mind the 40,000 that AT&T are buying in the next year alone.
http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2012/11/08/att-spend-14bn-networks.htm
or the 10m femto's already deployed. Sure is a tiny market, femto's offer lots of useful features & benefits that macro cannot compete with in some environments
Have a read of the link's you've sent, and the links within.
ATT are, it says, spending $14 billion on network infrastructure. THat includes small cells, whioch is the Alu' solution, which is a combination of a femto and pico.
The point is, the femto solution might be 1% of ATT's spend. 1%, that is a small market.
That's the whole point of a femto - they don't cost much. AT&T get an additional 40K sites for $140M (assuming that's the price, which I doubt). My point is that femtos aren't useless and they fill a valuable niche in providing coverage/capacity in hugely densely populated areas where macro would struggle. Plus, they can provide a cheap solution to rolling out extra coverage where it's needed. Note that in these types of solutions it is the operator that installs and pays for the backhaul and anyone on the right network can use them, rather than in the residential scenario where the backhaul piggy-backs on the home-owners DSL and they can only be used by the homeowner and a few other pre-specified phones.
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