Femtocells On The Rise

Following my recent Mobile World Congress 2010 recap, there is one subject I did not touch, that deserves a separate blog entry.

Femtocells.

I posted on femtocells back in November 2009. The post was inspired by the upcoming book by George Gilder, that will be the American version of the original works of Henry Gau. Gau / Gilder vision is, as always, both ultimate and radical, heralding the inevitable failure of LTE and massive simplification of network topology, optimized for just one task: bidirectional video streaming. While Gau Telecosm is by no means the Vision for the perfect world, the reality is, as always, far more complicated.

Personally I think we will get there, but the road will be much longer, as technology alone never wins in business environments. But there are clear signals we have already started the transition towards the world filled with femtocells.

Strolling along the crowded stands inside the MWC exhibition halls I had absolutely no problem using my broadband 3G connection. I think 2010 was the first year when connectivity was not a problem at all. Even when the halls were definitely more crowded with people with their always-on connected devices. I remember the past shows, when WiFi was falling apart, 3G was just not there and GSM data packets were on hold because all time slots were occupied by congested voice calls. This year was different. Despite the number of connected people and devices the throughput was there. Martin Sauter explained this scientifically in his blog post. What he described was not the ultimate femtocells world, but definitely something close to it. 300 narrowband carriers in the exhibition area.

Of course the topology must have been much more complicated, compared to Gau / Gilder vision. But I take it as a difference of real versus ideal worlds. And in my opinion things will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Even more. There will be more and more intelligence going into the very edge of the radio network. The wireless bandwidth will always be scarce, so there will be many decisions to be taken by the very edge network points, including the femtocells. We can be sure the wireless edge will be running full Layer 7 deep packet inspection, prioritizing the traffic based on many conditions, including customer - level service class. Quality Of Service, not the amount of data, is what we will be paying for. If I am a premium subscriber, in a very congested area, my voice and video packets will have maximum priority. Then there will be my web packets, with all the asynchronous services (like email) at the very end. And behind that will be packets generated by economy subscribers. Just exactly like on an overbooked flight. Business class goes first, followed by platinum and gold frequent fliers and only the remaining seats are distributed among a small number of lucky economy class passengers. On the other hand, when a flight is only half - sold, selected economy passengers are upgraded to business class at no cost.

The L7 DPI at the edge femtocell level has had a very strong presence at the 2010 MWC. PicoChip was the king of the hill, capturing most attention, but our well known L7 players like Cavium were present there. Of course the big ones, including Qualcomm are trying to close the gap.