Development of Enhanced Femtocell Base Transciever station by DoCoMo
DoCoMo announced the development of a compact indoor base transceiver station or otherwise referred to as femtocell BTS. The newly developed femtocell BTS supports extra fast data communication according to DoCoMo. The newly developed femtocell BTS is compatible with High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology which is an integration of HSDPA (downlink) and HSUPA (uplink) giving a boost in the upload speeds. The newly introduced DoCoMo’s femtocell has a best effort downlink capability of 14Mbps and uplink of 5.7Mbps in comparison to the current femtocell which offers downlink of 3.6Mbps and uplink of 384Kbps.DoCoMo introduction of femtocell is to expand mobile phone services at home as well as small offices where radio signals from DoCoMO’s outdoor base stations have a difficulty reaching the users. The new femtocell BTS will significantly improves data communication capability for such application as video, high resolution pictures and high quality music files as well as streaming of audio visual content on DoCoMo mobile phones according to the company. The new femtocell BTS will enable such services as mail notification to a parent when a child arrives home where their DOCOMO phone is detected that have entered the Home Area of the femtocell BTS. Another possible service is special limited-time electronic coupons sent from a store to nearby customers who choose to be detected when their DOCOMO mobile phones are in their Home Area. DOCOMO will begin offering installation of its new femtocell BTS device this fall. The announcement by DoCoMo is not surprising given the recent introduction of WiMAX wireless services in Japan which began at the beginning of July this year. The femtocell offers a way for DoCoMo to offer bundled services at competitive prices since there are no initial costs in building infrastructure plus the speed upgrades will come via software upgrades. On the other hand WiMAX suffers from high initial cost for implementation and equipment as well as area coverage making the incumbent wireless operators such as DoCoMo to stay away from offering wireless services based on WiMAX technology. Having said this, the near future certainly belongs to WiMAX for its high speed data transmission of 40Mbps and more; we just have to see how the politics of the thing will work it out in a right direction.
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