Femtocells: mobile phone masts in your lounge - TechRadar UK

Your mobile keeps you in touch when you’re out and about, but does it give you a strong connection at home or in your office? If not, that’s where a 'femtocell' could come in.

Mobile phone coverage isn’t just a problem out in tiny country villages. Wooden floors, under floor heating pipes, metal structures in walls, even fragments of metal in bricks all interfere with mobile phone signals. Just walking upstairs attenuates the signal.

The prospect of having to make calls crouched by the kitchen window led ex-Lucent engineer Will Franks to develop the first working femtocell – a small base station that provides extended mobile phone coverage via your broadband connection.

Google has been interested enough in the concept to pump money into his company, Ubiquisys, and the first femtocell units are now coming off the production line.

Hands on with a femtocell

Dubbed the ZoneGate, the Ubiquisys femtocell looks like a typical wireless access point/router and it plugs into your home's broadband connection.

The femtocell contains cut down and optimised versions of the principal elements of a mobile network core and radio access network. So, instead of radiating Wi-Fi, the femtocell broadcasts a rock-solid mobile phone signal. Think of it as a very small mobile phone mast in your living room.

The setup is very simple because the mobile network does all the hard work, checking that the femtocell is where it’s supposed to be and that it’s using a unique SIM (so you can’t take yours with you to a friend’s house).

The signal from the femtocell is so much stronger than the main mobile telephone network that, as soon as you use your mobile for voice or data, it automatically uses the femtocell.

In a recent demo of the technology, we found that calls were crystal clear and 3G data becomes the speedy experience that it’s supposed to be rather than the crawl it so often is. Yes, you can get the same experience using Wi-Fi and VOIP phones. But a femtocell is much less effort to use – and it works with any 3G mobile phone.

If it’s that good, will everyone want one?