Thursday, November 3, 2011

Femto as a Service (FaaS)

The following is from a recent Small Cells conference, presented by Colt Telecom.
I wanted to highlight the Femto as a Service (FaaS) concept as I think that this may be the way forward in future. Since multiple people have phones and devices from multiple operators and it would not be possible to have Femtocells from different operators, this may be an easy solution.

I am not exactly sure about what Spectrum would be used but I guess a better case could also have been that the Fixed operator has its own spectrum that it can use and a single Femto would allow any operator's device to connect. The Femto Core can route the call to the correct mobile operator so there would be no need for multiple femtos in a house.

2 comments:

David Chambers said...

I understood Colt to say that the mobile network operator would still remotely configure and control the femtocells, so would use the mobile network's spectrum. Financing is more of an OPEX model, renting them by the month on a bulk basis.

Dominique said...

Spectrum is owned by a mobile operator.
As for Femto as a Service (or RAN sharing), there is one company that owns the femtocell and routes the data back to the different mobile network operators it has agreeements with.

The company that owns the femtocell can be any acompany. For example, one mobile network operator, a fixed access network operator. There are different options depending on the business model, which depends on the country.