Small is beautiful: Put a cell tower in your house
Femtocells sound vaguely like a cross between a Feynman diagram and a biology class, but they're the latest piece of gear that millions of people will soon want in their homes without having missed them before. A femtocell is a small cellular base station designed to provide superior, short-range, indoor cellular coverage in a home or office. The idea behind femtocells is simple: the hardware tries to capture the ease of setup of a Wi-Fi network while allowing seamless connectivity for existing cell phones.
Woojune Kim, the vice president of technology at Airvana, a mobile broadband and femtocell equipment maker, explained the thinking behind femtocells. "Can you take the economics of the last 10 to 20 years, where we're able to make very small wireless transmitters like Wi-Fi base stations—can you make cellular base stations small enough and at that price point so that each of us can have our personal base station?" The answer, after years of trying, is yes.
