Femtocells and Wireless Carriers

After seeing David's post on femtocells, I thought I would add my 2 cents in. I've read about femtocells in my tech reading travels before, and to me they sound like a good idea. As long as you're internet connection is good you'll always have guaranteed cell phone coverage at home. But for wireless companies they must sound like a war drum coming from just over the hill.

Think about it, if you asked most people they probably think that cell phones signals and the internet are two separate things. But if people are using these femtocells in their homes because they don't get regular coverage from their wireless providers they might start to think, "Hey, why do I pay this company $200+ a month for a family plan when most of the time I don't even get a signal when I need it, when I could just use the internet?"

This is all fine and dandy when your at home and maybe even work, but what about when your out and your car breaks down? Now a lot of newer cars have onstar so they don't really have to worry but not everyone does. And since its rare to see a pay phone much anymore, you need a cell phone. That's the one thing that the wireless companies have going for them right now, they put all these towers up all over the place so people could carry a phone around with them and call whoever they wanted. This is also the one thing that could bring them down. New phones like the iPhone are able to use a wifi connection when its available instead of using a cell tower. I don't know how much it cost to put the towers up and connect them to networks but I would imagine it was quite a bit, and they are probably still trying to get their money back. So they charge you for things like text messaging when it doesn't cost them a thing for you to send it. Heres a link to an article over at wired about a New York Times article where they talk about how text messages are sent.

With new stuff coming out like Google Voice, I think wireless companies are going to be in for some rough times in the coming years if they don't be careful. The one thing that could almost crush the companies over night would be ubiquitously available wifi that they weren't providing. Cell phones are basically tiny screened computers so there's no reason for them to be tied to cell phone towers when there's perfectly good wifi that it can tap into. With the ability to make free calls over the internet with things like Skype where you get comparable if not better call quality for free, why would you want to keep paying companies that keep raising costs year after year as technology gets smaller and cheaper? As more and more cell phones do everything on the internet, cell phone use will transition away from connecting to towers to using city wide available wifi. And as more and more cities start offering city wide wifi, the drums that the wireless carriers hear will keep getting louder.

Edit:When I started this I didn't really mean it to be a diatribe against wireless providers or quite as long as it turned out to be.

Femtocell's Future

I've just heard of these devices called Femtocells which seem to be used as something related to minature cell phone towers that can be added by individuals. I remember always seeing those cell phone boosters that go on the back of phones and at first I thought they were talking about them, as they're trying to recieve a signal in buildings, but then upon reading further, I realize they function sort of like a cell phone tower does, except it takes the signal and sends it out through the wifi network.

I'm guessing that the cell signal is stronger then the wifi network and that's why they do this. Otherwise, I'm thinking that they should just have the cell phones use wifi when it's available to transmit the voice/data over the network instead of through the cell carrier. But I'm sure the cell phone companies want all the data going through them as that's how they get paid, haha.

None the less, I don't see why the cell companies don't just team up with Cisco and automatically install this cell in their routers. Or at least have only a slightly more expensive version that does. I mean, with the diminishing cost of supply that tech has, it should lower the expense of the devices to very cheap and then they can boast that there is service at more points then any other company, etc. I'm probably missing something about it. There's probably an issue with people using other's wifi networks and the fact that if the network's secure it might not works. Maybe I'm just misreading the article. Either way, I think this topic deserves some discussion.

I read the initial article at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125115911718255359.html