Femtocells: It's 'When' not 'If' > WISPs vs. the Femtocells?

WISPs vs. the Femtocells?

What are the bandwidth requirements for offloading cellular calls to an ISP? What's the architecture? Similar to that of a typical VoIP setup? I would imagine that your WISP operator acquaintance limits P2P apps precisely for the reasons that we've previously discussed. Bandwidth impacts and the quantity of connections opened...with the latter most likely causing the biggest problem due to the limitations of some of the radios used by WISPs. If the femtocell translates cellular data into an efficient data stream, I doubt that most ISPs would have any more concern than what they currently have with a VoIP provider such as Vonage.

reply to funchords
Private Femtocell installations aren't quite the same thing as Skype. In the Femtocell scenario only your phone would peer up with the device, so the only traffic that would ever transverse your broadband connection would be for the phone calls you directly make. This isn't like Skype where any member can become a supernode and transit call traffic of others; this is much like standard VoIP where you're only talking about a 64kbps (tops) RTP stream to carry the voice traffic of a small finite quantity of users (usually 1).

Both you and openbox might be right about that, especially if the Femtocell calls turn up being free.

Good input, guys.

Yes. My limited reading on the matter comes out being that these 'femtocells' are purely privatized and require you to 'authenticate' what phones you want to allow to use (I assume by phone #) into the device and only those can make outoing/incoming calls on it. I don't remember what the limit was on how many you could allow on one femtocell, but I do remember there was a limit.

I do not know, personally, if anyone has manufactured one that allows wide open use by anyone nearby using the same cell network the device connects to.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz

That's cool, thanks!

Although if I owned an apartment complex, I think I'd like to put these in my hallways to extend some of these signals indoors.