I have spent the last six months working on my RIT Graduate Project involving Femtocells.  After a great deal of research and writing over 80 pages, I have come to the conclusion that femtocells will not be the magical solution to capacity and coverage issues for wireless carriers.  This was a very surprising conclusion as numerous experts and companies supporting the technology have a much different viewpoint.  In my paper I discuss how I came to my conclusion and outlined that femtocells are a temporary solution until Wi-Fi chipsets are universal to all cell phones.   In the current market place, wireless carriers don’t seem to be pushing femtocells, but instead Wi-Fi based solutions which not only offer greater capacity but are also cheaper to deploy.  AT&T Wireless has had great success with offloading data usage by deploying Wi-Fi access point, something that femtocells have yet to deliver.  I could be completely wrong in my analysis, but I believe that Wi-Fi will be the perfect companion to 4G networks.    Until 4G coverage is widespread femtocells will be play an important role in expanding coverage, but I believe their deployments will be limited.

Click Here to Download my Femtocell Paper

Sprint for sometime now has been working on deploying it’s 4th generation network based on the 802.16 standard commonly known as WiMAX.  WiMAX was supposedly to be the next big thing after WIFI, but this has yet to play out.  This has led to many in the telecom industry to doubt if WiMAX will ever be a viable technology.  AT&T and Verizon Wireless have decided to not go with WiMAX for their 4th Gen network but instead LTE.  While we can debate WiMAX vs. LTE all day long, a large issue looms for Sprint: RF propagation.  Sprint is deploying WiMAX in the 2500Mhz spectrum, which is extremely high compared to other cellular spectrum’s which run in the 850Mhz or 1900Mhz.  Why does the frequency matter?  Well going back to physics, waves with higher frequency are absorbed more easily by the air and objects in the way of the signal.  In simple terms, the higher the frequency the shorter a signal can travel. Verizon Wireless in most markets broadcasts their voice (1xRTT) on 850Mhz while their data (EVDO) is on 1900Mhz. In many areas you can get on a signal on the voice network but no signal on the data network. The easiest way to fix this is to output at a greater amount of power, but this is an issue since this would drain a cell phone battery much quicker. The more logical solution is to add more cell sites, but this is very costly to the network provider. Sprint is advertising WiMAX as a mobile broadband solution, but if you are inside a building with your laptop, good luck getting a signal. WiMAX at 2.6Ghz will be operating at an even higher frequency than what the most common form of WIFI operates at. Many people have enough trouble getting a signal in their house only a hundred feet away from WIFI access points, let alone a mile or two away from the cell site. While WiMAX will be operating with more power than WiFI, having a signal travel miles at 2.5Ghz is still going to be a very hard task. AT&T and Verizon Wireless are deploying their 4G network in the 700Mhz spectrum which will allow their signal to easily propagate at double the distance of Sprint’s. I am currently a Sprint customer and have enough issues receiving service at 1900Mhz, I can’t imagine what service would be like at 2500Mhz. Is there any hope for Sprint? I would like for the WiMAX deployment to be successful, but it is pretty hard to argue with physics.