Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 03 October 2006 10:25
Business IT -
Technology
Page 2 of 3
Presently cellular operators wanting to offer converged services and compete with cheaper fixed network services use more basic location technology such as the 'home' base station to determine the home zone, or employ converged technologies, such as WiFi/cellular or bluetooth/cellular.
An emerging technology is
femtocells: very small base stations that are part of the cellular network but located in the customer's home and backhauled over the customer's broadband link. According to Grill, none of these are entirely satisfactory.
"The Orange AU service used Cell-ID so the zones were huge [resulting in] massive revenue leakage [with calls that should have been charged at mobile rates being charged at lower 'home zone' rates]. Maintenance of the HomeZone as base stations change etc...was a major issue in the Orange solution."
Dual mode solutions require the operator to supply a new and more costly dual mode handset (and the choice of these is much more limited than of pure cellular handsets.)
"Femtocells are one option to improve coverage, but the backhaul and provisioning of thousands of new base stations is a nightmare and it means there is something the subscriber must provision in their home. And if they make a mistake, customer care gets another call)," Grill said.
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