Mobile Operators offering EVDO Femtocells

Written By: admin on August 24, 2010 No Comment

Sprint is starting to ship 3G-capable femtocells, but only to qualified customers. Like the previous 2G Airave, the Airave Access Point acts as a mini cell tower using your home or office broadband connection to help boost voice and data coverage. The primary difference between the two is that the Airave Access Point supports EV-DO while the older Airave only supports up to CDMA 1x.

Evolution-Data Optimized abbreviated as EV-DO or EVDO and often EV, is a 3G telecoms standard for wireless transmission of data through radio signals, typically for Internet access. It uses multiplexing techniques including code division multiple access (CDMA) as well as time division multiple access (TDMA) to maximize both individual users’ throughput and the overall system throughput. It is standardized by 3GPP2 as part of the CDMA 2000 family of standards and has been adopted by many mobile phone service providers around the world particularly those previously employing CDMA networks. It is also used on the Globalstar satellite phone network. An EV-DO channel has a bandwidth of 1.25 MHz. The EV-DO feature of CDMA2000 networks provides access to mobile devices with forward link air interface speeds of up to 2.4 Mbit/s with Rev. 0 and up to 3.1 Mbit/s with Rev. A.

The Airave Access Point is not actually available for purchase. If you have specific coverage issues in your building, you need to inquire with Sprint to see if you qualify-if you do, Sprint will give the Airave Access Point to you for free, though you still have to pay for service. Once you end the service, though, you’ll have to return the femtocell to Sprint. This will run up to six simultaneous calls (up from the old Samsung’s three) and although the femtocell supports a VoIP landline connection, Sprint is telling folks that it’s not available for use just yet. This option could potentially hurt the revenue generation.

The jury’s still out on whether this looks better than the outgoing model — but hey, you can always shove it in a corner where no one will notice it; in the short term, the bigger concern will probably be finding a store willing and able to sell it to you.

Earlier this spring, AT&T Mobility launched a nationwide femtocell offering, the 3G MicroCell, which it developed with Cisco. AT&T sells its MicroCell. However, data usage on AT&T’s femtocell counts toward a subscriber’s data cap.