Airvana today revealed that performance tests of 3G femtocell succeeded in blanketing a home in CDMA EV-DO coverage, achieving rates higher than 2 Mb/s in all of a trial house’s nooks and crannies—rates that far exceed what is typically available to a user on the macro-cellular network. The results bolster Airvana’s claims that the femtocell could be used not only to provide better voice coverage in the home, but also to boost 3G data capacity.
Airvana conducted the tests as part of trial with an unnamed mobile operator, deploying its HubBub home base station in several different types of dwellings, including single-family homes, townhouses and apartments in urban, suburban and rural settings. In all cases, Airvana compared the results of the femto’s performance with coverage available in the home from the CDMA macro network and found that the femtocell typically offered 5-times greater capacity.
Femtocells have been targeted primarily at expanding voice coverage to the home, boosting overall network capacity and handling troubling “dead zones” without major infrastructure investments. Both Sprint and Verizon Wireless’ femto services are designed as voice-centric platforms supporting CDMA 1X voice coverage but no 3G. Airvana, however, believes focusing just on voice may be a mistake. It cites research from Informa, showing that while 36% of all voice calling is done from the home, 45% of mobile data usage also occurs in the home. A high-capacity 3G data session can consume far more network resources than a voice call, meaning carriers may start more feeling pressure to expand data services to home. The femtocell also has the advantage of using the customer’s home broadband connection for backhaul. Many data sessions could therefore be offloaded directly onto the public Internet without traversing the carrier’s increasingly crowded 3G access and transport networks.
Airvana isn’t the only vendor that thinks the data capabilities of femtocells are underplayed. AirWalk Communications last week launched an EV-DO femtocell targeted at the enterprise, which it claims could be used to replace the corporate wireless LAN. As an increasing number of laptops come with cellular technologies embedded, enterprises could use a network of femtocells in the office to provide baseline data connectivity as well as cellular voice connectivity, AirWalk proposed.
Airvana will release a white paper at CTIA Wireless detailing its trial findings. In addition, Airvana will demo applications from its FemtoZone platform, an industry-wide initiative launched at Mobile World Congress in February that integrates connected home services into the femtocell. Airvana will demonstrate an application that automatically generates SMS notices when a phone enters a femtocell’s coverage, serving as a notification system for families tracking each others’ comings and goings.
So far AirWalk and Airvana are the only vendors to announce their CTIA news, but they likely won’t be the last. Two major operators have live femtocells in their networks and AT&T is planning its own launch soon. The topic will be a hot one at CTIA, especially as vendors have begun to focus more on the femtos’ potential in the enterprise as well as the home.
