The success of Wi-Fi, the potential of fixed/mobile convergence, the reality of the mobile substitution trend, the evolution of home networking and the historically ambient concern over how to create smaller base stations that don't sacrifice features all are converging in a single product, believe it or not: the femtocell.

The buzz around femtocells has been building for more than a year — according to Wikipedia, the first femtocell prototype was produced by Motorola engineers in 2002 — and both the market pressure and opportunity related to all of these industry trends are leading some people in the industry to think the femtocell's big day may be nigh.

Basically, a femtocell is a very small footprint mobile base station using wide area network radio access technology, such as UMTS, that would be deployed in a single-family home or multi-dwelling unit building to serve the voice, data and potentially video needs of four to eight users. That makes it like the little brother of a microcell or picocell, which would be designed to serve the mobile needs of a larger number of users.

Femtocells could give mobile carriers entry to the home with services that would allow consumers to use exiting 3G handsets, rather than having to buy a new fixed-mobile converged handset, many of which have yet to come to market. In essence, they could give those carriers a way to battle the looming specter of revenue lost to FMC and the foothold that Wi-Fi access points already have in the residential market.

But an even more opportunistic view is that they could be integrated with broadband gateways or routers — or potentially even set-top boxes in the home — to become the center of a new kind of home network that promises all sorts of broadband applications.

ABI Research issued a report last month suggesting that there could be as many as 19 million femtocells shipped worldwide by 2011.

Meanwhile, the companies developing femtocells are maintaining a fairly modest attitude for now. At the recent Dallas Base Station Conference, an event bringing together an international community of devotees to the evolution of the base station, the femtocell chatter was both optimistic and cautionary.

PicoChip is one a just a few companies producing chips to power femtocells. In a conference presentation on femtocells — also sometimes called home base stations or access point/base stations — Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip, explained why femtocells are a good idea.

“What we have done traditionally with cellular is the equivalent of putting a flood light at the end of the street so that you can use the light from it to read in your living room,” Baines said. “This logic [of femtocell deployment] is the same thing as putting intelligence at the edge of the network.”

John Smrstik, DSP marketing manager for Texas Instruments, said, “The form factor for base station is no longer static. A femtocell could be how a cable company does wireless in the home. It's a trend worth watching.” But, he also added, “Femtocells are tricky, and we're still trying to understand what carriers might want to do.”

The tricky part has to do not only with backhaul — whether that would be Ethernet or something else — but also with the effect that potentially thousands of new base stations could have on a local mobile network environment.

“There's the question of how you integrate these with the higher network,” said John Baker, vice president of technical marketing for the base station subsystems group at Andrew Corp. “And there are all the issues of user authentication. Maybe it is just easier to roll up a big, old macrocell and blast away at the building.”

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