Femtocells

Femtocells are small cellular network used in homes, offices etc.

In the beginning, there were many debates and thoughts on femtocell:

• Is it really required?
• Will it be commercially successful?
• As femtocell will use the same frequency bandwidth as MACRO then how it deals the interference issue with MACRO.

Advantages of femtocell:

• It improves coverage. Generally, in the basement of the building or in the cell edge area, MACRO network coverage is not so good. In such places, femtocell creates it's own small cellular network and provides good network coverage.
• Being in high coverage area, UE requires less power to transmit and hence saves battery power which is very important in the world of smart phones where so many background services runs.
• Less deployment cost comparing MACRO deployment.
• Decreases the MACRO load. With more number of femtocells, the MACRO can serve more number of users at a given point of time.

Femtocells have it's own advantages from the both operators and users perspective. Consequently, many telecom biggies invested huge money to develop and deploy the femtocells and it's equally adopted by users happily in many countries.

Femtocell in future:

Being a home based cellular system, it can improve the home security, personal safety, and help integrating smart phones with other home appliances like TV, AC, Laptops, Media Players etc.

When children phone (registered users) comes in the coverage area of home femtocell, the parents can be informed by SMS. 

Also, they can be integrated for a registered user that which appliances need to ON when it's in the coverage of femtocell i.e when registers users phone latch on the home based femtocell network, it can automatically ON appliances like lights, AC etc.

But, it's not all rosy picture for femtocells in future. Femtocells have to compete with Wi-Fi networks.
To understand this, let's do comparative analysis of both the femtocells and Wi-Fi network.
Femtocell vs Wi-Fi

1. From the operators perspective, femtocells are more preferred as it's easy to integrate with the existing network whereas Wi-Fi has lesser inter-working with the existing network and there are concerns of handset choices etc.
2. Femtocells has additional cost of box over Wi-Fi and here Wi-Fi has advantage over femtocells.
3. Femtocells can only be used in its home location only whereas a Wi-Fi enabled phone can use any of the Wi-Fi network (access provided).

Hence, femtocells promotors have to work on idea and proposals so that additional cost of the box can be covered and also provides an attractive propositions for it's users.

Femtocell in INDIA:

With growing demand of high capacity and coverage and increase in the number of mobile users in India too, it's quite possible that we may see femtocell soon in India.
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