Femtocells, Sprint's last ditch effort

I should get off the subject and go about my business, but this femtocell thing is intriguing. It uses your home broadband to place calls and connect to the internet via WiFi. Sprint has invested lock, stock and barrel in this new technology, so if it fails they are pretty much done. Other U.S. carriers have eaten away at their market share steadily for years. Femtocells HAVE to be their saving grace.

Theoretically the femtocells will revolutionize the way we use our phones, the AIRAVE is the first American market test, if this thing catches on…well the traffic jam could be significant. To begin with what kind of voice quality can we expect? With all the other traffic on the net something is bound to get lost in the mix. Will the internet be able to handle an influx of millions of voice packets flying around? Privacy concerns enter in to the femtocell equation as well. Are these concerns well founded? It’s too soon to tell.

Ultimately, the convenience of femtocell may outweigh most concerns. The ability to travel between countries without paying roaming or swapping SIMs is a big draw. The company that is developing the chip technology is the Bath, England based PicoChip. Ubiqusys, the main vendor in England, promises “speed and coverage” are the hallmarks of femtocell.

The odd thing about the femtocell is the carriers still expect you to pay for using the multimedia data transfer, why anyone would pay extra just to have this content on your phone is beyond me, if the market it right, people will. Eventually, there maybe no need to invest in expanding wireless cell coverage through towers, instead the beefing up of the internet’s infrastructure will become the priority.

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Sprint PCS' Airave, Cost Shifting?

The Sprint network may have been the first network to go "all digital", but being an innovator in any industry your company is going to bare the brunt of the research and development cost. The payoff, being the leader and getting first crack at the new market share your product or service created.Then others follow your lend, add to your findings, and make the product or service better. It's the heart of capitalism, competition. Sprint coverage is getting out done by most major carriers. Other carriers, for one thing, are much more apt to deny you a service contract if your credit is bit smudged.

It would seem Sprint's solution to lack of network infrastructure, is YOU. Airave by Samsung is Sprint's newly announced add on to help you get a signal...as long as your high speed internet connection is up and running. Airave uses the internet to place calls thus helping to ease those overage charges and nasty dropped calls. When the signal from your Airave is out of range it seamlessly jumps back to the Sprint tower. This servers two purposes: first, if they sell enough of these units it may enable Sprint to take a reasonable sized chunk out of the cost of keeping up with growing network demands, secondly it will enable Sprint users to place calls in buildings that insulate there Sprint handsets from the tower's signal.

If you factor in the unit cost vs. the amount you can save by reducing you overage charges, or changing to a lower tier plan, the Airave makes an underachieving wireless carrier a bearable bargain.

"Starting today, Sprint customers in select areas of Denver and Indianapolis will be able to purchase the Airave at area Sprint stores for $49.99. Sprint plans to make the Airave available later this year to customers in the remainder of Denver and Indianapolis, along with Nashville, and to customers nationwide in 2008."
[via Sprint]

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