As wireline carriers in Europe and the US increasingly embrace the ‘homespot’ idea to extend their Wi-Fi coverage rapidly and cheaply, pioneer Free of France has gone a step further and introduced open access femtocells. This could increase the disruptive effect it has already been having on the country’s established cellcos since it entered the cellular market last year, adding low cost wireless and bundled services to its broadband and TV packages.
Part of Free’s ability to undercut its rivals on mobile tariffs lies in its skilful harnessing of its various types of infrastructure to create a large pool of low cost capacity, and to offer flexible bundles of connections and services. It was an early enthusiast of the homespot idea, which involves installing a Wi-Fi router in customer’s home, which has a portion of its capacity open for use by other subscribers in the neighbourhood. Free has been particularly aggressive by installing the routers for nothing, emulating the model popularized by FON.
Now it is extending the thinking to cellular connectivity, installing 3G femtocells in homes, which can improve coverage and capacity for the resident, but are also open to other Free subscribers in the area. This will create a small cell overlay at significantly lower cost than other approaches, because the femtocells are backhauled by the customers’ own broadband lines. Unlike most femtos, which are private, these will be open and allow for movement between the macro network outside and any small cells in range.
The cloud of Wi-Fi and 3G access points which Free, and its parent Iliad, aim to create was a fundamental aspect of their plan to disrupt the French telecoms space. Iliad founder Xavier Niel talked about adopting new mathematics in the economics and design of mobile networks, as the only way to be able to enter the market late and take on well established players. And take them on he has …. all three mobile operators, Orange, SFR and Bouygues, have been forced to reduce prices and adopt cost cutting programs as a direct result of Free’s competitive impact, and all three have reported lower profits as a consequence. Free Mobile has achieved 8% market share in its first year with its sub-€20 deals.
In Niel’s thinking, the residential equipment is the building block of the network, not the cell tower. To reduce the amount of capacity and capex it needs to pump into its HSPA+ macro network, it aims to ensure most of its traffic is offloaded to the Wi-Fi and small cell layers, and that these, in turn, can be rolled out cost effectively, by using the customers’ sites and backhaul and creating clouds of coverage with the community approach. The provider’s Freebox Revolution gateway is modular, incorporating the set-top box, Wi-Fi router and now the femtocell.
There is rising interest in the ‘open femtocell’ idea. Vodafone recently trialled this approach in a test in the village of Walls in the remote Shetland Islands off Scotland, and has called for other rural communities to volunteer for community 3G projects.
And on the vendor side, Qualcomm last month showed off a reference design for a femtocell small enough to integrate into consumer electronics devices such as set-top boxes and consoles, which would be used for sharing bandwidth with nearby mobile users. Matt Grob, CTO at the chip giant, presented a model called ‘neighborhood small cells’, which opens up the residential femtocell for shared access, and incorporates it into other home products rather than requiring a separate box.
Mirroring the Free philosophy, Grob said: ‘A little bit of that signal leaks outside and starts to provide little pieces of coverage outdoors. And if enough of it is happening indoors, then pretty soon you end up with pretty good outdoor coverage.’ His vision is to use Qualcomm’s UltraSON self optimizing network technology to combine signals from many cells in a neighbourhood, pooling them into a single network and coordinating the signals to mitigate interference.
The company says it has tested the technology and succeeded in delivering 700Kbps data speeds in areas which previously had virtually no coverage. ‘Our initial studies show capacity increases of up to 500x with a mere 9% penetration of households, and up to 1000x with 20% penetration while using 10 times more spectrum,’ said Qualcomm in a website report on its trial.
According to CIO magazine, Grob postulated the use of the 3.5GHz band to provide the extra spectrum to drive the 1000x capacity increase (‘1000x’ is Qualcomm’s key slogan for the year, with many of its developments geared to that notional goal for spectrum and mobile data capacity). Future technology advances will support the 1000x increase with far less spectrum, it argues, but for now, the 3.5GHz band ‘ mainly allocated for fixed wireless, and greatly underused ‘ is seen by some parties as a good way to address the spectrum shortfall. As a high frequency band, it is well suited to small cells, with short range but high capacity. The FCC has proposed opening up the frequencies for small cells (though this would involve sharing with federal users in the US) and there is interest in the potential for a global roaming band, although others argue 3.5GHz is more appropriate for small cell backhaul than access.