Applications
Femtocells
We all know from personal experience that as consumers, we often have difficulty with cell phone coverage in the home. The extra attenuation provided by walls and property inside the home is often enough to impact performance. Of course, consumers often use their devices the most when inside their homes. Consumers would clearly benefit from more complete in-home coverage for all their wireless devices.
With the advent of residential broadband connectivity, it's now possible to envision small base stations deployed in each house and backhauled through the residential broadband connection. These in-home base stations, or femtocells, are lower power, lower performance and lower cost versions of their macro and microcell cousins. They are similar in nature to WiFi access points. In addtion to benefitting the consumer with improved coverage in the home, they also benefit the service provider since they offload traffic from the service provider wide area wireless network onto an IP network. This can result in lower CAPEX and offers "natural" loadbalancing since in-home wireless connections will be automatically offloaded onto an IP network.
To advance this vision, residential equipment must be marketed with a consumer-friendly price tag. The typical consumer electronics price point is still below what can be achieved with today's macro and microcell technology repackaged into a femtocell. Radios for infrastructure are more expensive because of the performance requirements and because the sales and production volume is much lower than handset volumes. Until now, handset and infrastructure RF components have not been interchangeable (infrastructure frequency bands are reversed as compared to a mobile device).Common high volume components for both handset and infrastructure manufacturers increases the economies of scale for both markets. For this reason, a single, programmable radio platform offers one clear path to a low cost femtocell product..
