| Network Configuration. Femto cells is a WCDMA home base station or a repeater. It transmits signal to the WCDMA (3GSM) phones and to the extent that the Femto cell purchased is backward compatible to GSM, the old phones will also be able to connect to it. The Femto cell is located in the home or office and acts as a base station for the carrier. This will enhance the performance of your cell phone connection on 3G. One of my questions is then, why do we, the public have to pay to enhance the network performance of the carrier. We need to remember that the carriers will charge us for the calls and data connections we achieve through the Femto cell in the same rate structure as going through their base station.
The Femto Cell backbone is your fix-line broadband connection, DSL/ADSL/Cable/HTTP, which you pay a monthly tariff for. This is used to enter the Internet and then to the carrier data center to their gateway switch, the GGSN in the 3GPP spec.
This means that you the consumer is providing the base station and backbone (paying for) to compensate for the inadequecy of the carrier coverage.
Femto cells which carry voice already is using VOIP technology to allow your cell phone to connect to the global network to talk. For this reason technically a third party can introduce VOIP software in a Femto cell and assign a separate IP address to try to route the signal to their IP network. The difficulty with this is that the terminal (your cell phone) will be delivering voice single in a circuit switched format to the Femto cell. Only 3GPP based WCDMA manufacturer has the technology to transform the Circuity Swithced signal to IP and then route it over plain Internet (WWW).
BTW, one of the difficulties of Mobile VOIP is that wireless broadband capacity is very unstable in the US carrier networks. The Voice CODEC technology requires 10 to 100KBPS on a steady state basis to get quality voice. In data transmission latency just makes the connection appear a bit slow when the consistency of WWW is not sufficient. IN voice, however the latency will be result in inadequate quality of the voice service. |
