Wi-Fi, Little Cells Or Both?

 

Making Wi-Fi and network "glue" to support dual-mode phones and VoIP calls for FMC applications took a lot of hard work to ensure call quality and call handoffs between the cellular network and Wi-Fi, not to mention voice call handoff between Wi-Fi access points. Will all that hard work get blown away by picocells, femtocells, and the steamroller of new LTE (News - Alert) technology?

 

A pico/femtocell quickly extends the coverage of a cellular carrier into a home, small business, or building, using the customer/user's broadband as the backhaul part to the cellular carrier. End users get better in-building cellular coverage, service providers can charge for minutes and deliver date using someone else's bandwidth, so what's not to like?

 

Analyst firms are predicting millions upon millions of little base stations – you can call them picocells, femtocells, or things to kill Voice over Wi-Fi, it doesn't matter – will be sold over the next five years, with predictions ranging from 15 million units by 2013 to over 60 million LTE femtocells shipped in 2015.  The biggest question in the proliferation of pico-femtocells is how many 3G units will get deployed before LTE and 4G get rolling.

 

Femtocells (News - Alert) are a relatively new concept and the biggest hang-up in deploying them has been working out who will pay for the hardware in deploying them and getting the proper back office software lined up to handle calls. 

 

In comparison, Wi-Fi has literally been around forever, with years of development by numerous companies to be able to handle voice calls over Wi-Fi and to route those calls both between Wi-Fi access points and between a Wi-Fi network and the cellular network. We're talking about some serious bucks and hard labor to beat 802.11b/g into submission to handle voice in a seamless fashion.

 

Despite all that Wi-Fi development, femtocells will be a sweet temptation for enterprise deployments – and ironically, just as Wi-Fi is starting to hit full-swing in smartphones. Keeping voice calls on cellular frequencies means that an IT manager does not have to have an A-1 Wi-Fi network or (more importantly) the expense it would entail. There's also the matter of having a process/server capable of processing call handoff between a cellular network and a corporate Wi-Fi network.

 

Dual-mode phones with both cellular and Wi-Fi capability used to be relatively rare, but smartphones and the desire to surf the net has made Wi-Fi a necessity; end-users now typically find more limitations in the software a carrier allows to carry voice calls than any real handset limitation.

 

Femtocells offer a plug-and-play capability, with the "only" resource needed to be provided by IT is a sturdy LAN connection with some QoS mechanism to prioritize voice calls; no fussing with hotspots or extending coverage areas for 802.11 b/g required. Many companies that have already deployed Wi-Fi networks may find it easier to roll out femtocells than to upgrade existing gear.

 

However, it will be a while before a clear winner between voice-enabled Wi-Fi and femtocells emerges in the enterprise space. Some corporations will prefer the ubiquity of Wi-Fi to support both data and voice while others will leap at the chance to keeping data and voice (relatively) separate.