Verizon femtocell user report (Telecom)
AES
Despite being within 2 or 3 miles of downtown Palo Alto, my house (and
several adjacent houses in our area) are in a dead zone or shadow zone
where our Verizon cell phones (and those of anyone else coming to our
house) are more or less unusable inside our house or anywhere on our lot
(their displays show at most a single bar or tower which flickers
randomly on and off every few seconds, losing any calls that may get
connected).
Two days ago we purchased a Verizon femtocell unit (officially known as
a "Verizon Wireless Network Extender") and plugged it into the Ethernet
router for our Comcast Triple Play Internet connection.
The unit auto-connected to the Verizon Internet site within minutes; the
GPS light went on a few minutes later; and we now have 2 to 4 bars on
all our phones throughout our largish house (and still zero bars at the
street side and the back edge of the lot).
Purchase price about $120; 3 or 4 simultaneous calling channels; no
monthly charge. Wish we'd done this months ago.
John Levine
>monthly charge. Wish we'd done this months ago.
I'm impressed. In the normal world telcos pay for the base station
equipment, pay for the backhaul, and pay rent to the site owner. I
negotiated three cell site leases on the municipal water tower when I
was the water commissioner and later the mayor. The rent is
substantial, totalling about $40,000 per year even though we are in a
rural area far from any major highways.
But they've persuaded you to flip the model around entirely so you pay
for the base station equipment, you pay for the backhaul, and you give
them free rent.
Time to buy VZ stock, I guess.
R's,
John
har...@hallikainen.com
infrastructure for free. You're paying for the equipment and the
circuit, but the price is not that high. While the range is limited,
this actually can be a benefit in terms of increasing capacity through
frequency reuse.
I wonder what the limitations on range are. I imagine the antenna is
nowhere as efficient as a typical base station antenna. They may not
be able to increase power and still comply with FCC emissions safety
requirements.
Anyway, get a bunch of these out there and they get a bunch more
capacity at no cost.
Harold
AES
John Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:
I take your point -- but the unit (whose price was actually $220 -- mea
culpa) is equivalent to about two month's billing for our multi-user
cellphone service, which we find well worth having for our household.
Gets the job done; makes our cellphones now fully usable at home as well
as during extensive local and more distant traveling; and benefits a
couple of other tenant occupants also.
Garrett Wollman
> for the base station equipment, you pay for the backhaul, and you give
> them free rent.
In return for which, you get service in a place that otherwise would
not have any, the market being too small to justify investment on the
carrier's part. Sounds like a good deal to me.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
Matt Simpson
> But they've persuaded you to flip the model around entirely so you pay
> for the base station equipment, you pay for the backhaul, and you give
> them free rent.
Clever, isn't it? But I think the ATT femtocell is even better (for
them). If I recall correctly, they even charge you a monthly fee.
Robert Bonomi
Now, consider the range of the 'femto-cell', and how many possible users
there that benefit from it's emplacement.
BTW, Verizon _is_ paying for fully *half* of the cost of the backhaul for
each of those femto-cells deployed.
danny burstein
>> >Purchase price about $120; 3 or 4 simultaneous calling channels; no
>> >monthly charge. Wish we'd done this months ago.
>>
>> I'm impressed. In the normal world telcos pay for the base station
>> equipment, pay for the backhaul, and pay rent to the site owner. I
>>
>> for the base station equipment, you pay for the backhaul, and you give
>> them free rent.
>>
>> Time to buy VZ stock, I guess.
> I take your point -- but the unit (whose price was actually $220 --
> mea culpa) is equivalent to about two month's billing for our
> multi-user cellphone service, which we find well worth having for
> our household. Gets the job done; makes our cellphones now fully
> usable at home as well as during extensive local and more distant
> traveling; and benefits a couple of other tenant occupants also.
With the disclosure that I'm both a user and a shareholder, back when
t-Mobile started their similar "hot spot at home" option, which uses
dual-capable "cell phones" to either tap into their network _or_ to
use any accessable WIFI connection [a], they gave the users "untimed"
use when hooked up via WIFI.
Alas, they dropped that as a freebie, so now you've got two choices:
1: to dip into your "bucket of minutes" with each call
2: to pay $10/month extra and get that unlimited option back.
> From a technical standpoint it works quite well, and has the
> advantage over VZ in that the WIFI signal doesn't have to be just
> yours, but can be a coffee shop's, a library, etc., and can be in
> Uzbekistan. (Or, of course, Walla Walla Washington).
[a] you can use these phones with an "open" WIFI base, or
one that just needs a basic password. It won't work with
a "splash screen".
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
David Lesher
>> But they've persuaded you to flip the model around entirely so you pay
>> for the base station equipment, you pay for the backhaul, and you give
>> them free rent.
>>
>> Time to buy VZ stock, I guess.
AES <sie...@stanford.edu> writes:
> I take your point -- but the unit (whose price was actually $220 --
> mea culpa) is equivalent to about two month's billing for our
> multi-user cellphone service, which we find well worth having for
> our household.
The real beauty is that by doing their job for them, you help them
charge you more on both ends. You use more minute$; and soon, you'll
get rewarded with the excess use charge on your VZ DSL line to boot.
At the very least, Verizontal should give you free usage of your
phones on your femtocell.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
Gary
news:2009120306330...@simone.iecc.com...
I'm not so sure femto cells will last. T-Mobile has UMA, which is a
fancy way of saying WiFi enabled phones can make connect to T-Mobile's
network through the internet. They even give you a router when you
sign up for service. The advantage to the user calls made over WiFi
are free.
In short, T-Mobile uses WiFi to get the same effect as a femto cell at
a much lower cost to the subscriber (free).
Considering that more and more phones have built in WiFi, I can see
this quickly becoming the standard way provide femto cell like
coverage.
-Gary
Geoffrey Welsh
> Two days ago we purchased a Verizon femtocell unit [...]
How does the connection compare to the 'conventional' cellular network? I
couldn't help but wonder whether the latency of the cable internet service -
especially during congested periods - affected the audio quality.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I'm very interested in this question as well, but I'd like additional
information:
1. Does it only work on a Verizon DSL line?
2. Is there any special setup involved, i.e., does a technician visit the premise?
TIA.
Bill Horne
Moderator
AES
"Geoffrey Welsh" <gwe...@spamcop.net> wrote:
1) So far as I understand, it works on any Internet connection -- in
our case via Comcast cable Triple-Play. An Apple Extreme base
station/router is daisy-chained over a 1 m RJ-45 cable from our
Comcast modem to provide an Airport Ethernet LAN throughout our
house. This Airport base station has three Ethernet ports along
one edge; the femtocell is connected into one of those with an
RJ-45 cable.
I believe the instruction sheet (temporarily mislaid) says you can
take the unit with you anywhere away from home and connect to an
Ethernet connection anywhere you can find one.
Comcast gives us typically a 10 to 20 MB Internet connection. Users
guide for the femtocell claims it should work OK with a 300 to 400 KB
DSL connection.
2) No setup, no technician, just took it out of the box, connected
wall wart power adapter and RF-45 cable to the Airport router, and
it started working within a couple of minutes.
I can't comment on audio quality (other than that it certainly seems
quite OK); the signal level we get from the nearest real Verizon tower
is so weak that our cellphones are more or less unusable without the
femtocell.
Robert Bonomi
>> Two days ago we purchased a Verizon femtocell unit [...]
>
>How does the connection compare to the 'conventional' cellular network? I
>couldn't help but wonder whether the latency of the cable internet service -
>especially during congested periods - affected the audio quality.
>
>***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> I'm very interested in this question as well, but I'd like additional
> information:
>
> 1. Does it only work on a Verizon DSL line?
Any 'net connection with adequate bandwidth will work.
> 2. Is there any special setup involved, i.e., does a technician visit
> the premise?
No technician, but it does 'assume' some local services running,
notably 'DHCP' for the box to get it's local IP address assignment.
This assumption _is_ a reasonably safe guess for virtually all
contemporary home service.
Geoffrey Welsh
> Comcast gives us typically a 10 to 20 MB Internet connection. Users
> guide for the femtocell claims it should work OK with a 300 to 400
> KB DSL connection.
A voice connection doesn't require much bandwidth, so it should work
with just about any wired or fixed wireless broadband service, but
voice connections are very sensitive to latency, and whether you have
256 kilobits per second or 10 megabits per second, one poorly
configured BitTorrent client might render your calls intolerable...
***** Moderator's Note *****
Why?
Bill Horne
David Clayton
Unless the underlying IP infrastructure has more than adequate
capacity or gives priority to voice traffic, other high demand traffic
can saturate a node and delay the voice packets.
--
Regards, David.
David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.
Stephen
>AES wrote:
Voice traffic is normally symmetric (OK, with cellular maybe you get
some silence suppression part of the time).
So, what matters is the slwest traffic stream - upstream on a typical
ADSL or cable broadband link.
>
>***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> Why?
The voice is sensitive to jitter and packet loss.
Conventional G.711 / G.729 voice used with IP telephony jitter usually
has a hard limit much lower than for typicl data traffic (well below
100 mSec).
ITU recommendation is packet loss below 1%.
Any sugnificant contention on a home link with no priority for voice
is going to trash those numbers.....
>
>Bill Horne
--
Regards
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