Femtocells: Opportunities and Challenges for Business and Technology

Preface

“Small things have a way of overmastering the great.”

—Sonya Levien

I have been an enthusiast for in-building wireless systems for the last 14 years or so. They just make sense to me: why would you not put capacity and coverage where the people are? Why would you not deliver low power, high performance, spectrally efficient services, rather than building yet more expensive metal work on hilltops and rooftops? There are also lots of interesting technical challenges, which have been relatively neglected in both academic and industrial contexts.

At times in-building wireless has seemed like a hobby when compared to the serious business of outdoor systems. When I conducted research work into radio architectures and radiowave propagation for high capacity, high bit-rate indoor systems in the mid-1990s, funding bodies and colleagues questioned how such levels of capacity could ever be necessary – surely that many people making phone calls couldn't fit into a given room? Why would people need data at bit rates beyond a few tens of kilobits per second on a fixed line, let alone on a mobile phone?

The world looks very different now and the need for dedicated in-building systems increasingly seems like part of the prevailing orthodoxy. Wireless LAN systems exploded into the public domain a few years ago, playing a role in homes and in businesses, which few had predicted, and they became a standard part of enterprise IT equipment. Mobile systems increasingly included in-building systems ...