Femtocell to boost your 3G signal at home

New buzzword of mobile phone industry makes debut at show

12 February 2008 18:32 GMT / By Stuart Miles

A new technology that promises to give you the "perfect" mobile phone reception in your home has been shown off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Called "Femtocells", the new tech connects to your home broadband connection before boosting the HSDPA coverage in your house allowing vastly improved connection speeds for any HSDPA device such as mobile phones or datacards.

"It's like a 3G network in a box" Keith Day, vice president of marketing at Ubiquisys, told Pocket-lint.

Currently on trial with O2 in the UK and due to be a consumer product in 2009, the technology promises to drastically improve connection speeds in the home, something that Ubiquisys, the company backed by Google behind the product, says is desperately needed.

Hoping to offer an alternative to Wi-Fi, the box, which has no buttons needs no set-up and no passwords to access it as really all it is doing is boosting the 3G coverage in your home.

However the company is looking to the technology to deliver more than just better signal in the home.

"There are a number of applications that can be used with the service", Day told us. "Because we know when the user is on the femtocell, it means we can do a number of things such as trigger downloads, uploads or sending of text messages."

One application Day explained to us was the idea of taking photos on your cameraphone and then having them automatically uploaded when you got home. Teaming up with ShoZu the mobile media service application found on the LG Viewty users using the application will be able to set the Femtocell as a home zone and act accordingly.

Another is a reverse of this whereby a connected PVR device automatically uploads recorded programmes to your phone so when you next leave the house you've already got the information without having to be prompted.

The final example Pocket-lint was given was a HomeNumber service the company has already developed. The service detects when you are in the home and so if someone rings your landline it will automatically divert the call to your mobile as well.

Where the service is likely to succeed, according to Ubiquisys, is that operators will be able to offer heavily reduced data costs compared to current standards as the technology is not having to transfer data over the mobile phone network, just the localised cell and then down a broadband connection.

As for concerns of putting what is the equivalent to a mobile phone mast in your house? Well according to Day, the femtocell box uses 100x less power than a standard DECT phone.