Femtocell Diagram

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.   

It's an interesting question for anyone - but for me it carries particular interest because of my prior position as CEO of the WAP Forum... one of the "bleeding-edge" technologies that was being used as a tool to modify the behavior of mobile device users.  I've often wondered why there's such inertia around the functionality of wireless devices.

There are, in my estimation, a few factors at play here:

If I get a phone call from someone whose number doesn't match an entry in my Address Book it simply shows the number of the caller and, in most cases, I send it to voicemail.  When it's time to return the call, though, I often don't know where the caller is located.  Now, while it's true that with a cell phone the area code doesn't always indicate the number's location, in most cases it still does so I like to use th earea code to determine whether I can still call or if it's too early or too late to be considered normal business hours.  How do you get that information easily and quickly, though? 

I most cases the caller ID, or the message, will give you that information, but for the times that it doesn't there are a couple of quick, cheap tricks you can use to get the location of an area code.  If you're near a computer it's pretty easy to do, of course, by accessing one of the many sites that contains telephone and area code info.  Alternatively, you can just Google "area code 818" in the search line and it will return the answer (in that case, the suburbs of L.A. where I live).  But what if you're not at a computer and just have your cell phone?

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this post, I have taken the plunge and become one of the 14%.  I have completely given up my landline service and am now living with just a wireless phone.   The holdup in doing so was my desire to keep my current landline phone number and to reduce my charges by a significant amount.  I was able to accomplish both using a great service called RingCentral and it's working out wonderfully well. 

What happened was that I wanted to find a way to port my number to a service that would simply serve as a message center - AT&T offered a way to do it but it was ridiculously expensive for what it offered and I wanted something that would give me a more full-service approach but still keep the costs down.  

I have taken the plunge and become one of the 14%.  I have completely given up my landline service and am now living with just a wireless phone.  Well, almost.  That 14% refers to the households that have no landline service and only wireless service - in fairness, we've still got a landline phone in the house as our "house line" but it rarely gets used.  In fact, these days when a call comes in on it it's a virtual certainty that there's a telemarketer on the other end. 

But back to the matter at hand - going completely wireless.  As readers of this blog may recall I've talked about going completely wireless in an earlier post and decided to wait.  There were lots of reasons for it, including the commonly feared problems of safety, convenience issues, etc.  I was concerned about having to carry my wireless phone (an iPhone) around the house all the time, what would happen if my local cell site went down, whether it would be a hassle to get everyone to switch the phone numbers to reach me in their address books and so on.  Turns out it was a lot easier and painless than I had anticipated.  There was one hangup (no pun intended) that delayed the process but once I got over that things happened quickly. 

There's a ton of competition for traditional radio stations today - iPods, satellite radio, back-seat DVD players, video games, PSP-type devices and so many more.  Sometimes, though, you just want to listen to the radio.  For example, there are a couple of shows on NPR that I enjoy listening to and, while I can download them on podcasts, hearing them live (especially when they are news shows) is a lot better than hearing them a day or two later.  The radio just offers a level of convenience that is tough to beat for music, too - find a station that you enjoy and forget about playlists, downloading, syncing your iPod, etc. 

The one place that radio has been historically missing, however, much to my surprise and chagrin, has been on cell phones.  Now, you'd think with all of the Bluetooth, WiFi, CDMA, GSM, HSPDA, EDGE, EVDO and other technologies packed onto a tiny chip that fits inside a cell phone that they'd be able to add a simple FM tuner - but I've never seen a phone that included one (including my iPhone, which does about everything else my computer can do but still can't tune into my favorite jazz station).  Especially in today's world of mobility, when you never know what city you're going to be in tomorrow, it would be nice to have a solution that would put a traditional radio on your phone.

I enjoy talking to my friends, my fiancee, my Mom and my business associates - most of the time.  There are times, however, that I just want to get a message to someone and not necessarily speak with them.  Oh sure, there's email and text messaging, but that requires some level of typing and can't get across the emotion, urgency, affection or nuance that your voice can deliver.  Voice is still the killer app for phones but it can be downright off-putting - or even intimidating at times - to connect with someone live instead of just leaving a message for them on their voicemail.

You might be as guilty as I am, in fact, of doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago - calling someone's number when you know darn well that they're either busy, sleeping, away from the phone or otherwise unable to answer the call - just so you can leave a message instead.  And, more innocently, there's the matter of safety and convenience when sending messages.  I'm constantly amazed (and mildly terrified) when I see people behind the wheel or a two-ton vehicle in bumper-to-bumper traffic (or worse, at 70 MPH) tapping out a text message or email on their Blackberry/iPhone/Treo.  So if you're like me you're probably thinking that there's a middle ground here that combines the brevity of text and it's inherent "no answer needed" mode with the speed, convenience, safety and flexibility of voice.  And now there is.  I've been testing it for a few weeks and am hooked - and so are the people I've messaged with it.