Wednesday 5 November 2008

Get a Femtocell and make money

This post again is a concept but I dont see why the operators may not go this way.

The main reason you would put a Femtocell in your house or your shop is because you want cheaper calls and reliable coverage. The Femtocells would probably be setup as Closed Femtocells or better known in 3GPP Release 8 as CSG (closed subscriber groups). It may be beneficial for the operator that the Femtocells are setup as 'open' rather than closed. This can be useful in shops or malls where the shoppers can experience bad coverage in particular part of the shop or mall.

To motivate people to keep open access, they could offer free cash to the Femtocell owners on which outsiders (IMSI's not on the access list) camp and originate voice and data calls. In the web world, similar approach is used by Google Adsense. UK operator '3' has also tried similar cashback scheme before with decent success.

This approach may encourage lots of shops and people (especially during Credit Crunch scenario) to install Femtocells thereby increasing coverage significantly.

On the flipside, I should mention that people might start abusing this and increase the interference in the Macro cell. Also, the operators have to plan the Femtocell rollout in such a way that such interferences would be kept to minimum.

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