| Femtos are dumb, Wi-Fi works Femtocells have always been kind of a dumb idea, especially since we've have WiFi for years now.
Femtocells have no scale or volume. WiFi has ridiculous scale and volumes. There's probably billions of WiFi devices out there, and it keeps growing. WiFi is being integrated into more devices and volumes keep increasing, some analysts think the industry will ship more than a billion WiFi devices in 2012 alone.
The problem has always been the telcos. Specifically the telcos fears of becoming a "dumb" pipe, revenues being sqeezed, and their overpriced, fragile network being seen for what it really is.
So the telcos "discouraged" WiFi enabled cell phones and Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), also known Generic Access Network (GAN) in 3GPP lingo.
Thanks to the iPhone, everyone clearly sees the value in having WiFi in a mobile device now. This trend will continue and eventually all mobile devices will have WiFi, and that can't be stopped.
But most carriers are still holding fast on UMA. There's no technical reason why the iPhone, or any other WiFi phone, couldn't support UMA though. Aside from a few progressive carriers like T-Mobile, most big carriers are holding it back.
If you think about it, it's a pretty dumb move on their part. Having your paying customer's traffic offloaded on unlicensed spectrum (which you didn't buy), on somebody else's device (which you didn't buy), and backhauled over the internet (which you don't pay for) back to you to handle the rest of the way (which has almost no marginal cost). It seems like such a good idea, it saves money and frees up capacity on the cell network. I have to wonder why almost all of them have their heads up their butts, they should be tripping over themselves to implement this. |
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1 edit | Why isn't T-Mobile mentioned here? We use UMA - calls over wi-fi for $9.99 a month for all phones on a family plan, 24x7 on T-Mobile without eating into are monthly allotment of minutes. UMA is a good thing! |
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 sivranBack to Opera againPremium
join:2003-09-15
Arlington, TX
kudos:1 | reply to Samsonian
My phone doesn't have wifi, and I bet T-Mo wouldn't let me do UMA at home even if I wanted to since I'm on prepaid. 
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In dadkins' memory, Think outside the Fox... |
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| reply to dsl_sutra
With T-Mobile' setup you are limited to whatever phones they decide to offer that will let you use wi-fi to connect. With my Airave I can use any of the phones that I currently own with no problems. |
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| reply to dsl_sutra
said by dsl_sutra:Why isn't T-Mobile mentioned here? ... UMA is a good thing! You should re-read my post. I explicitly mentioned T-Mobile (I'm a customer in fact). I never slammed UMA, in fact my entire post extolled the benefits of UMA enabled, WiFi phones.
"There's no technical reason why the iPhone, or any other WiFi phone, couldn't support UMA though. Aside from a few progressive carriers like T-Mobile, most big carriers are holding it back. If you think about it, it's a pretty dumb move on their part..." |
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| reply to dsl_sutra
said by dsl_sutra:Why isn't T-Mobile mentioned here? We use UMA - calls over wi-fi for $9.99 a month for all phones on a family plan, 24x7 on T-Mobile without eating into are monthly allotment of minutes. UMA is a good thing! I'm having trouble understanding why you have to pay T-mobile to use the internet connection that you already pay for to place calls. How is this costing them any money? |
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