Home Base

2Wire Gateway to Bring Femtocells Indoors

The majority of calls made on mobile phones in 2007 are expected to be made within buildings, while just 30 percent of mobile calls originate while wireless subscribers are outside, according to research firm Deloitte.

2Wire’s Ted Fagenson

That usage trend has led some wireless companies to put base stations closer to buildings for better indoor coverage. It’s also contributed to the introduction of dual-mode phones that support both cellular and Wi-Fi technologies, so the call switches over to the wireline voice link via Wi-Fi while users are indoors.

A third way to address this trend is to locate femtocells, which effectively are mini cellular base stations within buildings. At least one residential gateway provider, 2Wire Inc., already has embarked on a plan to add femtocell technology to its solution. It expects to test its integrated residential gateway/femtocell later this year, with plans to make the product commercially available in the first or second quarter of next year. The fact that 2Wire is partially owned by communication powerhouses Alcatel-Lucent, a major cellular infrastructure vendor; AT&T Inc., which uses 2Wire devices to deliver its Homezone hybrid DBS/DSL services; and Telmex, makes this news all the more interesting.

More than 8 million 2Wire gateways — which combine the functionality of an ADSL modem, router, firewall, VoIP and home networking — already are installed in subscribers’ homes. AT&T uses between 15,000 and 20,000 of those for Homezone.

Ted Fagenson, vice president of business development at the vendor, says AT&T may be among those pulling for the femtocell approach.

Putting a femtocell into a home improves coverage; makes backhaul free, because it then can be done over the home’s DSL link; and brings mobile bandwidth up to 3mbps to 5mbps, “which opens up pricing policies that are pretty unique,” says Fagenson. The increased bandwidth available via femtocells could allow wireless operators to deliver all-you-can-eat bandwidth packages and help drive adoption of wireless data services, he says.

And, unlike dual-mode phone technology, he adds, going the in-home femtocell route doesn’t require subscribers to get new mobile phones and involve complicated handoffs between the cellular and Wi-Fi networks. The requirement to replace the handset for dual-mode functionality is a significant adoption barrier, Fagenson says, considering people can be resistant to change and the cell phone/PDA has become a vanity item, yet there are very few dual-mode phone options from which to choose today.

“The [fewer] things — like the phone — you have to change the better,” agrees Ray Smets, vice president of marketing for the broadband solutions group within Motorola’s Connected Home Business.

He adds that femtocells are gaining a lot of momentum, but there is no clear winner between that approach and the Wi-Fi/dual-mode option. So Motorola is working both ends of the problem. Motorola already has announced a relationship to remotely manage a femtocell product, which Smets declined to name, but has no announced plans to integrate femtocell functionality into its residential gateway products. Meanwhile, the company is addressing dual-mode with its cable SurfBoard products.

Despite all the recent talk about femtocells, John Sweeney, director of product strategy and management for IP subscriber networks at Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco company, says this approach has significant limitations. One is that femtocells will require multiple frequencies, which will make it difficult to get economies of scale on this technology, Sweeney explains, adding that femtocells at the end of 2008 are expected to be in the $200 price range. The fact that femtocell vendors are making lots of money selling their wares to the cellcos for outside use also indicates these suppliers might not be motivated to drop their prices to spur adoption of this new, in-building application, he adds.

That’s why SA has no definitive plans to add femtocell technology to its residential gateways, Sweeney says. Instead, SA believes adding QoS capabilities to Wi-Fi-enabled residential gateways via a software download is a more attractive way to address new trends in networking such as fixed/mobile convergence and the desire to move content among devices within the home.

Residential gateways are getting smarter.

Beyond just providing broadband access, router, firewall, VoIP and home networking functionality, these in-home devices also are positioned to act as the go-between for content sharing among different devices in the home.

2Wire’s gateway with femtocell

John Sweeney, director of product strategy and management for IP subscriber networks at Scientific Atlanta, a Cisco company, says residential gateways now are being outfitted with network-attached storage and DLNA-compliant server capabilities to do just that. (DLNA stands for Digital Living Network Alliance, a group of leading consumer electronic, PC and mobile handset companies that came up with a method that allows users to easily acquire, store and access digital music from almost anywhere in their homes.) “The NAS does the storage,” he says. “The DLNA server lets servers and players understand what their roles are and serve up content. So you could take content on your PC and play it on your TV set, which today is hard to do.”

The first generation/prototypes of these types of residential gateways will be in cableco labs by midsummer, with production units expected to be available in early 2008 following CableLabs’ certification, says Sweeney.

Whether we’re talking about cableco or telco home network architectures, “over time, [residential gateways are] headed to be the home hub, as we move to the connected home,” says Ray Smets, vice president of marketing for the broadband solutions group within Motorola’s Connected Home Business.

That’s why Motorola believes service assurance is becoming an important aspect of residential gateway solutions. Vendors need to offer management systems along with their residential gateways so service providers can manage and track usage in the home, Smets says, adding “service assurance will be a huge theme of Motorola’s at NXTcomm.”

While the DSL Forum’s TR-069 addresses initial issues of residential gateway management, if a customer has a virus on his PC or the nanny cam doesn’t work, TR-069 doesn’t address that, says Smets. So the next step is to let telcos’ help desks go beyond the gateway to remotely view other devices in homes like the set-top boxes, PCs or other devices. “The DSL Forum and the IPTV Forum are all currently working on that, but there are no standards, so Motorola is on the leading edge of that,” he says.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines