From theory to practice: femtocells put to work in Singapore

Singapore’s StarHub, a full fixed/mobile converged service provider, has become one of the world’s first to offer femtocells commercially. As an early implementer, I am in the unique position of using the new technology on a daily basis and am therefore getting a good feel for its pros and cons.

A femtocell is, for all intents and purposes, a mini 3G base station you have in your house. It’s like your own personal mobile network connection. It doesn’t look much different to a regular WiFi router and it simply connects to an existing broadband router via a regular ethernet connection. I was a little surprised when two young, but very knowledgeable, technicians from StarHub turned up at my door to install this wonder of modern technology, especially when you consider that it took all of two minutes.

Most of the hard work was already done at the network layer. StarHub's femtocells communicate directly with a dedicated DNS. All I had to provide in advance was provide my cable modem MAC address and the phone numbers of the mobiles that would be used in the house (up to four). As soon as theHuaWei femtocell was connected it was recognised by the network it immediately took over from the nearest base station (about 300 metres away) by ‘shaking hands’ with the two mobile phones in our house.

The only noticeable difference was that my handset (a 3GiPhone) showed the StarHub network name and unique cell number. My wife’s phone (an HTC running Windows Mobile) thought it was roaming and only displayed the symbol for that function. I am told that newer Nokia phones actually state they are connected to a Home Zone service. Presumably, as femtocells become more common there will be a standard way of indicating connection. This notification is pretty important as I will explain later.

The main reason I had two technicians around was to determine coverage throughout my whole house and determine the optimum location for the femtocell . I live in a two-storey townhouse constructed of concrete and steel, not the most conducive for wireless transmission as my experiences withWiFi will testify. Despite this, I only have one blind spot and that’s in the upstairs loo, gratefully removing any urge I may have had to use the phone from there! Everywhere else in the building showed strong signal.

Previously on one side of the house I had good service to the network, on the other almost none. I found it quite clever that as I walked outside through the doors on either side of the property, the connection switched to the main network. I doubt if this was planned and was most likely coincidental, but it continues to amaze me how clever it is to do that. If the signal was much stronger then the Home Zone service could be subject to abuse.

Apart from the differences mentioned above, and just in case I don’t notice the cell ID on my handset, as a call is made a comforting voice lets me know that I am making the call from my Home Zone. I thought this might become annoying but it is comforting to know that I’m connecting via the femtocell and saving my valuable package minutes.

In fact, all calls made from my fixed line (via cable) service, are also free but as my mobile plan comes with a number of free minutes and SMSs included each month, these are not decremented when I connect via the femtocell.