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 Vodafone Italy has launched its "Vodafone Station" product, wrongly misnamed as a femtocell. We've renamed it an otmefcell because it provides a hardwired service in the home using a broadband cellular connection.
The purpose of this solution is to provide instant service for new DSL broadband customers. The box is equipped with box DSL modem and a USB port for a USB broadband cellular "dongle". By using the cellular broadband service, it allows the customer to start using the service immediately without waiting up to two or three weeks for the DSL line to be physically cabled and provisioned. Additionally, it can be used as a backup during outages. We suspect its designed not to be used in parallel to achieve higher overall throughput. The dongle can even be used away from the home, providing broadband on the go. The product is manufactured by Huawei who already have strong market share in USB data dongles - see a picture here. However there are other vendors in this market, such as Billion who make a ADSL/WiFi router with a USB port that accepts several types of HSPA data dongles. There are typically restrictions on which USB dongles are supported (drivers are presumbly required to support each type), although the leading vendors are generally available. We've called this type of box an "otmefcell" because effectively it operates as a femtocell in reverse. Instead of providing high speed/high quality cellular access in the home through a broadband DSL wired connection, it emulates a broadband DSL wired connection using the cellular wireless service. This would appear to somewhat go against the commonly promoted benefits of femtocells, namely that there is insufficient capacity or quality for broadband cellular in the home. Clearly, there is benefit to both consumer and operator by connecting the "otmefcell" to wired DSL broadband. Traffic speed and contention ratios are likely to be much improved, whilst the cost of providing high speed broadband over DSL would be less that via mobile cellular. Given the fixed spectrum allocation of each mobile operator, there is a limit to the traffic capacity of each cellsite. Even by using many of the tricks to boost capacity, such as active antennae, higher modulation schemes etc., at some point additional cellsites would be required with all their associated costs. The additional traffic load imposed by a single broadband user for two weeks at the start of a multi-year subscription should not significantly affect the overall capacity required across the network. Other combinations are also possible - for example a femtocell/ADSL router with USB dongle for wireless backup, but that combination would seem to be a bit of a "null modem", performing little useful purpose other than relaying the signal and perhaps saving a bit of portable device battery life. The concern for femtocell vendors may be that this type of device becomes prevalent and undermines their business case.
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