Ubiquisys recently announced that it has secured funding from Google for its ZoneGate Femtocell. This is an interesting move from the Internet Giant which has also been showing interest in Mobile Phones.
The Inquirer suggests that if Google is showing interest in Femtocells then they have become sexy.
Ubiquisys's Zonegate femtocell plugs into DSL and then provides access to WiFi, Ethernet, ordinary telephones and USB. But the most important thing is that it also acts as a local 3G base station. So Google has something in mind which can be done by providing Broadband in homes.
Dean Bubbly, writing in Seeking Alpha says that he is surprised by Google's move. He writes:
Yes, I know that Google's talking about pitching $4.6B for the US 700MHz spectrum... and yes, I know that there's a 700MHz standard for UMTS going through 3GPP at the moment. But I'd have thought that femtos at that sort of
frequency was fairly pointless, as the big attraction of 700MHz is that it's got great range and goes through walls easily.
The real advantage of 3G femtos, in my view, lies in 2100MHz 3G spectrum (i.e. most of the world today outside the US), and probably in the future in 2600MHz band. It's conceivable that Google might want to start bidding for those chunks of spectrum around the world, but I'm unconvinced that it's
going to follow the classic cellular path (i.e. 3GPP UMTS or LTE) rather than something more Internet-like.
There's an outside possibility that Google might, in fact, want to do something with WiMAX - but at present, Ubiquisys doesn't do WiMAX femtos, although chipset supplier PicoChip is certainly doing suitable silicon. Maybe that's what the investment's for . . .
What no one is talking about is, Is there some way of advertisement using Femtocells? I am sure if Google is going this way then there must be something on advertisement.
We will have to wait and see.
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