Femtocells Instead of Small Cells?

I have just seen the future of broadband and it does not consist of building millions of small 5G cell sites on poles. CableLabs has developed a femtocell technology that might already have made the outdoor 5G small cell site technology obsolete. Femtocells have been around for many years and have been deployed in rural areas to provide a connection to the cellular network through a landline broadband connection. That need has largely evaporated due the ability to use cellphones apps to directly make WiFi calls.

The concept of a femtocell is simple – it’s a small box that uses cellular frequencies to communicate with cellular devices that then hands-off calls to a landline data connection. Functionally a femtocell is a tiny cell site that can handle a relatively small volume of cellular calls simultaneously.

According to CableLabs, deploying a femtocell inside a household is far more efficient that trying to communicate with the household from a nearby pole-mounted transmitter. Femtocells eliminate one of the biggest weaknesses of outdoor small cell sites – much of the power of 5G is lost in passing through the external walls of a home. Deploying the cellular signal from within the house means a much stronger 5G signal throughout a home, allowing for more robust 5G applications.

This creates what I think is the ultimate broadband network – one that combines the advantages of a powerful landline data pipe combined with both 5G and WiFi wireless delivery within a home. This is the vision I’ve had for over a decade as the ultimate network – big landline data pipe last mile and powerful wireless networks for connecting to devices.

It’s fairly obvious that a hybrid femtocell / WiFi network has a huge cost advantage over the deployment of outdoor small cell sites on poles. It would eliminate the need for the expensive pole-mounted transmitters – and that would eliminate the battles we’re having about the proliferation of wireless devices. It’s also more efficient to deploy a femtocell network – you would deploy only to those homes that want to the 5G features – meaning you don’t waste an expensive outdoor network to get to one or two customers. It’s not hard to picture an integrated box that has both a WiFi modem and a cellular femtocell, meaning the cost to get 5G into the home would be a relatively cheap upgrade to WiFi routers rather than deploying a whole new separate 5G network.

There are significant benefits for a home to operate both 5G and WiFi. Each standard has advantages in certain situations within the home. As much as we love WiFi, it has big inherent weaknesses.  WiFi networks bogs down, by definition, when there too many devices calling for a connection. Shuttling some devices in the home to 5G would reduce WiFi collisions and makes WiFi better.

5G also has inherent advantages. An in-home 5G network could use frequency slicing to deliver exactly the right amount of bandwidth to devices. It’s not hard to picture a network where 5G is used to communicate with cellphones and small sensors of various types while WiFi is reserved for communicating with large bandwidth devices like TVs and computers.

One huge advantage of a femtocell network is that it could be deployed anywhere. The cellular companies are likely to cherry pick the outdoor 5G network deployments only to neighborhoods where the cost of backhaul is affordable – meaning that many neighborhoods will never get 5G just like many neighborhoods in the northeast never got Verizon FiOS. You could deploy a hybrid femtocell to one customer on a block and still be profitable. Femtocells also eliminate the problems of homes that won’t have line-of-sight to a pole-mounted network.

This technology obviously favors those who have built fast broadband – that’s cable companies that have upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber overbuilders. For those businesses this is an exciting new product and another new revenue stream to help replace shrinking cable TV and telephone networks.

One issue that would need to be solved is spectrum, since most of it is licensed to cellular companies. The big cable companies now own some spectrum, but smaller cable companies and fiber overbuilders own none. There is no particular reason why 5G inside a home couldn’t coexist with WiFi, with both using unlicensed spectrum, with some channels dedicated to each wireless technology. That would become even easier if the FCC goes through with plans to release 6 GHz spectrum as the next unlicensed band. The femtocell network could also utilize unlicensed millimeter wave frequency.

We’ll obviously continue to need outdoor cellular networks to accommodate roaming voice and data roaming, but these are already in place today. Rather than spend tens of billions to upgrade those networks for 5G data to homes, far less expensive upgrades can be made to augment those networks only where needed rather than putting multiple small cells on every city block.

It’s been my experience over forty years of watching the industry that in the long run the most efficient technology usually wins. If CableLabs develops the right home boxes for this technology, then the cable companies will be able blitz the market with 5G much faster, and for a far lower cost than Verizon or AT&T.

It would be ironic if the best 5G solution also happens to need the fastest pipe into the home. The decisions by big telcos to not deploy fiber over the last few decades might start looking like a huge tactical blunder. It looks to me like CableLabs and the cable companies might have found the winning 5G solution for residential service.