Anticipating the femto transformation
Smart mobile devices monitor their environment and adjust aspects of both their appearance and their behaviour depending on what they sense. For example, depending on the level of ambient light, a device might adjust the brightness of its screen display and keypad display.
Before too long, mobile phones will be sensing the presence of “femtocells” in their neighbourhood. A femtocell is like a miniature wireless network mast, for use in a home or office. It plugs into the local broadband (e.g. cable network or DSL) and provides strong shortrange wireless coverage.
Ordinary mobile phones, without any modification, can detect and use the femtocell signal. This is welcome news if normal wireless reception in your house is patchy or intermittent. You now get a great signal all the time, courtesy of your home broadband connection. You can use this great signal for either voice calls or data.
In a way, connecting to a femtocell is like your phone switching from cellular to WiFi coverage. Both WiFi and femtocells can provide lower-cost strong wireless coverage, suitable for mobile browsing and more. But the femtocell avoids the need to have WiFi hardware in your phone. That can bring down the cost and size of the phone. It also avoids the need for complex software and user interface to oversee the switch between two different kinds of wireless network. That’s because the femtocell generates the same kind of signal to which the phone is already well accustomed.
Recent coverage in IT Business Edge states:
The remaining months of 2009 and 2010 will see the carefully planned and extraordinarily important rollout of femtocells go into high gear.
But that’s just the start of what the anticipated “femto transformation” could achieve. There’s great potential in applications that can detect when a mobile device has reached your home femtocell. Some experimental initial applications are covered in Michelle Donegan’s review in Unstrung, Femtocells Kick Apps:
In partnership with Mobica, Ubiquisys demo’d an app that automatically downloads a user’s latest podcast to his mobile phone as soon as he gets home. The femtocell’s detection of when a user arrives home triggers the download to start automatically…
ip.access showed off its Facebook virtual fridge notes app, which essentially uses the presence information available on the femto to deliver messages. Here’s how it works: Say you have pet fish, and while you’re out of town, you want to remind your roommate to feed them when he gets home. You can compose the reminder message on Facebook, which will be delivered to your roommate’s phone as soon as he is within range of the femtocell at home. The femto recognizes that the roommate has arrived home and sends the message: “Feed the fish”…
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Before too long, mobile phones will be sensing the presence of “femtocells” in their neighbourhood. A femtocell is like a miniature wireless network mast, for use in a home or office. It plugs into the local broadband (e.g. cable network or DSL) and provides strong shortrange wireless coverage.
Ordinary mobile phones, without any modification, can detect and use the femtocell signal. This is welcome news if normal wireless reception in your house is patchy or intermittent. You now get a great signal all the time, courtesy of your home broadband connection. You can use this great signal for either voice calls or data.
In a way, connecting to a femtocell is like your phone switching from cellular to WiFi coverage. Both WiFi and femtocells can provide lower-cost strong wireless coverage, suitable for mobile browsing and more. But the femtocell avoids the need to have WiFi hardware in your phone. That can bring down the cost and size of the phone. It also avoids the need for complex software and user interface to oversee the switch between two different kinds of wireless network. That’s because the femtocell generates the same kind of signal to which the phone is already well accustomed.
Recent coverage in IT Business Edge states:
The remaining months of 2009 and 2010 will see the carefully planned and extraordinarily important rollout of femtocells go into high gear.
But that’s just the start of what the anticipated “femto transformation” could achieve. There’s great potential in applications that can detect when a mobile device has reached your home femtocell. Some experimental initial applications are covered in Michelle Donegan’s review in Unstrung, Femtocells Kick Apps:
In partnership with Mobica, Ubiquisys demo’d an app that automatically downloads a user’s latest podcast to his mobile phone as soon as he gets home. The femtocell’s detection of when a user arrives home triggers the download to start automatically…
ip.access showed off its Facebook virtual fridge notes app, which essentially uses the presence information available on the femto to deliver messages. Here’s how it works: Say you have pet fish, and while you’re out of town, you want to remind your roommate to feed them when he gets home. You can compose the reminder message on Facebook, which will be delivered to your roommate’s phone as soon as he is within range of the femtocell at home. The femto recognizes that the roommate has arrived home and sends the message: “Feed the fish”…
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