What is a Femtocell?

A Femtocell is a low-power base station communicating in a licensed spectrum, offering improved indoor coverage with increased performance; functioning with the operator’s approval; offering improved voice and broadband services in a low-cost, technology-agnostic form factor. Here we have purposely stressed specific key descriptions to convey our message. With the intention of operating indoors, the femtocell will transmit with low power in an authorized frequency band. One of the many benefits of operating in an authorized frequency band is that the operator has the sole rights to utilize it. Hence, the operator controls who communicates in that band and can guarantee a certain level of QoS to all who are involved in occupying the private band.

Alcatel-Lucent Small Cell

Providing indoor coverage can be a difficult task, especially due to the propagation path loss of the outer walls of the premises as well as the inter-floor loss. These losses can aggregate to a considerable amount, thus making high-speed 3G data access indoors extremely challenging. Relying on a base station physically located a few kilometers away in distance is not necessarily the best method to effectively deliver high-speed data services to an indoor user—especially since these high-speed data services typically have lower progressing gain and/or use higher-order modulation, such as 64-QAM, to arrive at the high-throughput performance.

The small coverage footprint coupled with the friendly indoor propagation environment will create an atmosphere of high SNR to provide improved performance to support multimedia services at a reasonable price target. Finally, the specific RAT (Radio Access Technology) used to provide this feature is operator dependent.

More specifically, the femtocell concept entails using a low-power base station; a cellular phone; and broadband Internet access such as XDSL, cable, or fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). In the residential case all traffic would be routed through the home’s ISP connection. This concept is used not only to extend and provide cellular service but also to encourage other applications. The femtocell is sometimes called a personal base station (PBS) or Home NodeB (as referred to in the 3GPP standards body).

Home Cell generic enclosure (front and back view)

Incorporating the femtocell into a home environment or small office scenario will open a wide variety of opportunities. Traditionally,the home wireless applications have been less complex, with the exception of WLAN-related options. However, home cordless phones, wireless remotes, etc., have been not only less complex, but also easy to use and feasible for cost, risk, and other reasons. Placing the femtocell into the home will allow users to benefit from the many wide-ranging and highly complex multimedia applications available within the cellular handset sector. As time progresses, it is easy to point out the increased complexity and computing power within these cellular phones, which confer on them bragging rights as being one of the most complex consumer devices in the home. In fact, cellular phone manufacturers are moving their business plans to provide wireless applications to their respective handset platforms, such as Apple, Nokia, Google, and Microsoft.