Femtocell DiagramAn astonishing number hit me the other day: 16%  That's the percentage of households that have only wireless phones.  Another number that makes that even more remarkable is an additional 13%, which is the percentage of households that have a landline and a wireless phone but make and receive the majority of their calls on their wireless phones.  Combine the two and you've got a head-slapping "Holy cow!" moment when you realize that more than one out of every four households - and darn close to one of every three - is using their wireless phone either exclusively or nearly exclusively to make and receive their calls.

While this is great news for the cellular companies of the world and pretty lousy news for the old-school landline companies whose livelihoods depend on constant month-after-month subscription fees for what it apparently a dying service (I ditched my landline a while ago, as regular readers of this blog will know, and posted a series of stories about it called "Going Wireless").  It's also presenting different types of challenges for the people who are using the wireless phones: how to manage the number of minutes used and how to ensure that you've got sufficiently good coverage in your house to be able to use your wireless device as your primary phone.  There's a development that you'll start hearing about more and more which will help users address both of those challenges, though, and it's called a "femtocell."  Here's what it is and how it works.   

Micro, pico, nano - femto?  Yes, femto.  When you're talking about the tiniest of the tiny, the most microscopic of all (at least so far) cell sites, the latest buzz word is "femto."  It's actually one-quadrillionth (I swear I'm not making that up - see HERE) of a whole and Sprint is taking the lead in naming their cell-site-at-your-house product the "Femto-cell."  The theory behind this product is pretty simple - it's a cell site in your house.  You continue to use your own cell phone but don't get charged for minutes used while you're at home. There's a small transmitter/receiver (referred to in radio geek terms as a "transceiver") about the size of your cable modem or wireless router (D-Link, LinkSys or Apple Airport as examples) that picks up the signals from your cell phone and then relays them over the Internet - you'll need some kind of broadband connection like a cable modem, or at the least a DSL line - instead of over the cellular network. 

The beauty of this is that any minutes that you use this way aren't charged against your "bucket" of minutes because you're not accessing the cellular carrier's network - calls are going out over the Internet connection instead - and that the coverage will be consistent and, probably, terrific (unless you live in a house the size of Bill Gates') because of the cellular equipment that's now based in your den or office.  Essentially, everyone wins.  It's safe, inexpensive (the "router" portion of it will be somewhere between $0 and very cheap) and saves money.  I'm anxiously waiting for AT&T to announce the availability of the technology so that I can install one in my house.   

Right now the product is only available in a couple of test markets through Sprint- Indianapolis and Denver - but Sprint plans to spread the femto-cell-love nationwide quickly. T-Mobile has a similar product called "HotSpot@Home" that uses your WiFi connection, and is a similarly beneficial product, but I don't view it as being as good a solution because you need to choose from a much more limited selection of phones that will be "dual-band" - meaning both cellular and WiFi - in order to take advantage of it.  The femtocell idea is the way to go and should be available through many carriers soon.