Femtocells what and why

Kind of a strange name but femtocells are very small cell towers. You may also see the term picocell used in place of femtocell, femtocells are a type of picocell. If your question is what good is a small cell tower think about cell phone coverage inside your home, in my case a femtocell has to help. Basically this femtocell is suppose to give you good cell phone reception in your home and sends the calls out over your broadband connection. So depending on how good your broadband connection, that will determine if one of these Femtocells will help in your situation. There is lot of work going on in this area. Sprint has started a trial with there AIRAVE device in Sept. 2007 in Denver and Indianapolis with plans for general availability in 2008. The pricing on the Sprint device seems very good also at $49. Although I have heard that femtocells may go for around $200. So not sure if the Sprint pricing is just for the trial or will also apply for the nationwide roll out. In addition to Sprint, Vodafone has a trial starting in Spain and O2 is starting a trial this month in the UK. I'm guessing the other wireless carriers will also be doing trials in the near future. So assuming this technology performs well the decline in land lines could really accelerate especially with the recent flat rate unlimited calling plans that many of wireless carriers have just come out with here in the US.

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In case your interested here is additional background information on femtocells from Wikipedia.