Be Excellent To Each Other

What the hell is this? Technical guesses please.

http://online.vodafone.co.uk/dispatch/P ... D=PPP_0061

A 3G base station?

A Vodaphone scented airfreshener.

How does that work then?

Your phone sees it as an antenna, then it uses your broadband as the backlink to the network, I'm guessing. Gaywood would probably be able to tell you more.

That's what I was hoping.

Ha - see! You snub my information, and Gaywood offers nothing! NOTHING!

It's for washing yer backside, right?

Technically, this is a UMTS question, not a GSM one. HAH.

Craster is correct. The industry jargon for these things is "femtocell". They use your existing ADSL for backhaul to the network, then appear to your phone (and probably your neighbour's, too) as a normal part of the cellular network. There's a lot of buzz in the industry about these, with operators seeing them as perfect ways to plug gaps in their coverage for free (as the cost of the device is largely paid for by the consumer and even the backhaul is free to the network).

I'm dubious about their commercial viability. If I lived out in the sticks and I wanted better coverage I would maybe buy one; but if I lived in a city and saw 3G dropouts because of a lack of capacity I'd feel aggrieved at propping up my operator's network infrastructure.

Part of the original pitch was going to be to get enhanced data service on phones -- the idea was that you'd not be charged for data access over the femtocell. Then WiFi on phones happened and now that bit looks stupid.

So in effect you pay £160 to use VOIP on your mobile phone, whilst paying standard call charges as if you were using the network? Rather than just using VOIP? Tell me I'm wrong before I start listing the flaws I see with this and explode in a fit of rage.

That does appear to be Vodafone's pitch, yes. There's no mention of calls placed through the femtocell being free.

Priceless.

Femtocell?

That's a very girly name.

WHAT?

Macrocells are your normal 30-plus-foot-ish towers. Microcells are 3-5m or so tall, often used to provide extra capacity in high density urban areas, and used for temporary erection at events like Glastonbury. You also used to sometimes see microcells used to provide coverage in operator's shops if (embarrasingly) they didn't have very good signal strength.

There's no such thing as a nanocell, for some reason that eludes me. Picocells are things about as big as a router that provide coverage over an area a bit larger than most WiFi access points; however, they don't have a full network stack and rely on there being more cleverness upstream of them to co-ordinate with the other nearby cells. Picocells replaced microcells for in-building coverage boosting, for example in large shopping malls. Femtocells are picocells with more brains that can run themselves, making them "bigger" than picocells despite the name.

No-one said industry jargon has to make sense.

Heh. Fem. Gay.

Of course, if this is genuinely targetted at the rural market with poor reception, they probably have a shit broadband speed as well, which won't support this.

This, theoretically, could have been of use when I lived up the road and all networks had a terrible reception in the flat. Again though, the best ADSL access that we could get wasn't fast enough to support skype.

Amount of bandwidth isn't the problem; QoS guarantees are the trick. Your router needs to know how to give the VOIP packets absolute priority over everything else. Most consumer routers don't really do that though. I have no idea what would happen if you had torrents going full speed and someone rang you through your femtocell, but I bet it'd be closer to "not work" than "work".

"DO NOT ANGER FEMPUTER!"
\

Yes. For home use it stinks.

Interesting hardware for the price though. It's a BTS basically, right?

You could buy a few of them and make your own 3G network, for your private beex island.

Except it doesn't actually have any of the call-handling functionality of the network, just the coverage.

Plug 'em into this: http://bs11-abis.gnumonks.org/trac/wiki/OpenBSC

I could see them being given to businesses to sweeten the deal. Say you are out in a remoteish industrial estate; "equip your staff with 200 Vodafone handsets and we'll throw in fifteen range boosters for free".

It's more than that in UMTS terminology I think, although I've never worked on the hardware side of things. Wikipedia says it's a Node B, and an RNC, and an SGSN; "node B" is the UMTS equivalent term to GSM's "BTS" I think. My PhD wasn't even based on any real world communications protocol, although it was modelled after GSM somewhat (because it was sponsored by BAE, so it had to be applicable to scary military systems, but I didn't have clearance to know about the scary military systems in question).

You wouldn't have a network if you just plugged a number of these into an Ethernet network. There's stuff upstream that has to happen.

I cannot imagine anything more frustasting that trying to make some half-baked Open Source piece of software integrate with commercial telecoms kit. Also, that's GSM again and not UMTS.