Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part IV: Using a Wireless Network
A (future) alternative to FMC
Cell phone service providers and equipment
makers have more tricks than just FMC up their
sleeves when it comes to improving your inhome
service coverage. Another technology
being developed and seriously considered by the
cell phone industry is known as the femtocell.
Simply put, a femtocell is a small (the size of a
cable modem) cellular base station that can sit
inside a home or a small business — an even
tinier version of the picocells that many cell
phone companies use to improve their coverage
inside shopping malls and convention centers.
A femtocell will connect to your broadband
Ethernet connection (just as a Wi-Fi FMC solution
uses that connection), and your mobile
phone will switch over to the femtocell whenever
it is in range. Where FMC solutions and femtocells
differ is in how your cell phone connection
is transmitted wirelessly in the home. With FMC,
your phone switches over Wi-Fi and then sends
the calls over your broadband connection. With
a femtocell, your phone doesn’t do anything different
than it does anywhere else in the world —
the femtocell looks just like any other cell tower
to the phone, and your phone connects to it
when the femtocell’s signal is stronger than the
outside cell tower’s signal.
This means you don’t need to choose a special
mobile phone to use a femtocell — any
cell phone can work with femtocells. The only
Understanding FMC (Fixed
Mobile Convergence)
limitation is the type of cell phone network the
phone is designed to work with (GSM or CDMA).
If you have a CDMA phone (for example, from
Verizon or Sprint), it can connect only to a CDMA
femtocell. GSM phones (AT&T or T-Mobile) can
connect only to GSM femtocells.
Like FMC, femtocells aren’t something that you
can just pick up at the local electronics superstore
and install — they’ll be something that your
cell phone company sells, rents, or gives you to
improve your coverage. An example of an early
femtocell is Samsung’s CDMA Ubicell, which can
be seen at the following URL (just search on the
page for femtocell): www.samsung.com/us/
business/telecommunication/.
If you can’t yet get (or don’t want) FMC service
and you’re not willing to wait until femtocells
become available from your mobile phone
provider, consider an in-home cell phone extender.
These devices use an antenna placed outside
your home or in a window to boost the
power of incoming phone signals. Essentially a
cell phone extender gives you inside the house
the signal strength you have out in the driveway.
Danny’s been using zBoost from Wi-Ex
(www.wiex.com) and he’s had great results. This
is a cheap ($399) way of getting the signal to
reach all the nooks and crannies of your home.
Just remember, a cell phone extender won’t help
if you have no signal outside the house.
The next big thing in wireless and VoIP is here now and it’s called fixed mobile
convergence, or FMC. FMC is the combination of mobile (cellular) and VoIP
into a single device. With FMC you can use your phone as a cellular phone
anywhere you have coverage, and when you’re in range of a Wi-Fi access
point and broadband connection, your phone can automatically switch over
to the Wi-Fi network.