Review: Optus femtocell, aka 3G Home Zone

Stuart Corner
Saturday, 06 August 2011 23:30

Opinion and Analysis

Optus last month became the first mobile operator in Australia to offer femtocells as a full commercial product. Optus promoting them as solution for Optus mobile customers with poor coverage in their homes.

The most significant thing the Sydney Morning Herald could find to say about Optus new femtocell, the 3G Home Zone, launched late last month was that users could be barred from making emergency calls through the device if their broadband service went over quota and had been throttled to less than 128kbps.

That's true. The device won't work on a broadband service at less than 128kbps, but when you go to the Optus web site to register it - which you must do before it can become active - there are clear warnings about this. Still it is somewhat surprising: you would have thought that with all the smarts manufacturer Alcatel-Lucent has build into the device it would be smart enough to detect a slow speed broadband line and shut itself down releasing its 'captured' mobiles to the main Optus network.

Given all the fears about radiation when Optus or anyone else tries to put a base station near a school it might have been more important to question the wisdom of having such a device in your home. Of course it is much lower power than the main base stations but the available information is not entirely reassuring.

The device arrived with a card from Alcatel-Lucent assuring the user that it complies with Australian Radio Communications Standard (Electromagnetic Radiation- Human Exposure) Standard 2003, and adding "this device when in operation requires a minimum of 40cm safety separation from the head of any other part of the body."

Such safety information should be printed on the device, not stuck on a card that is likely to get separated from the device and lost. Had I not read that, and other things being equal, I would have stuck the 3G Home Zone Optus gave me to try on top of my DSL modem router which is only about a metre from my head.

CONTINUED