AT&T's Femtocell: Enter the 3G MicroCell
AT&T's Femtocell
If you're already familiar with the femtocell offerings from Sprint and Verizon, you'll find the AT&T MicroCell is much the same. It's the same premise - calls and data from phones you specify are routed over your own internet connection. Except for one small distinction - AT&T's offers 3G HSPA/UMTS data up to 3.6 Mbits/s alongside voice, where the Sprint Airave and Verizon Network Extender offer 2.5G 1xRTT CDMA2000 data at 144 Kbits/s alongside voice. Of course, that means for the AT&T MicroCell to be useful, you'll need a 3G phone; the older GSM/EDGE only iPhone 2G won't see any benefit from AT&T's femtocell.
It's interesting to note that virtually all of the major carriers in the USA now offer femtocells or similar means of expanding coverage. T-Mobile is the notable exception, which foregos a femtocell in favor of Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) - a 3GPP standard that allows the same cellular data to be sent over any IP network, most commonly over WiFi. Let's compare the offerings from all the major providers:
| Carrier | AT&T | Verizon | Sprint | T-Mobile |
| Solution | Femtocell - "3G MicroCell" | Femtocell - "Network Extender" | Femtocell - "Airave" | UMA - "HotSpot@Home" |
| Branding | Cisco | Samsung | Samsung | NA |
| Technology | 3G UMTS/HSPA for voice and data | 2.5G CDMA 2000 1xRTT | 2.5G CDMA 2000 1xRTT | UMA voice over WiFi |
| Simultaneous Calls | 4 Simultaneous | 3 Simultaneous | 3 Simultaneous | NA |
| Standby Approved Callers | 10 | 100 | 50 | NA |
| Data Bitrate | 3.6 megabits/s (HSDPA 3.6) | 144 kilobits/s | 144 kilobits/s | NA |
| GPS Fix Required | Yes | Yes | Yes | NA |
| Upfront Cost | $150.00 or $50 with $100 rebate and $20/month unlimited calling plan | $249.99 | $99.99 | Wireless AP Cost |
| Hand-On/Hand-Off | No/Yes | No/Yes | No/Yes | Inter AP Handover/Yes |
| Coverage | 5000 square feet | 5000 square feet | 5000 square feet | WiFi AP range |
| Add Ons | $20/month unlimited calling $10/month with AT&T DSL $0 with AT&T landline | None | $5/month required $10/month unlimited calling - 1 line $20/month unlimited calling - multi line | $10/month unlimited calling |
While Sprint and Verizon are offering virtually the same Samsung-branded product, AT&T's MicroCell is a new femtocell bearing dominant Cisco branding. The same caveats apply here: the device needs to be able to get GPS fix, meaning you'll likely have to install it near a window or in the corner of your house. Also, the hardware supports handovers from the femtocell back to the main cellular network, but calls initiated outside of femtocell coverage can never migrate or hand-on to the femtocell. Range is advertised as being 5000 square feet, and the hardware is portable; you can take it on trips or to different places so long as you register the location online. You can also sell the device to someone else - it isn't forever locked to one AT&T account. AT&T stipulates that a 1.5 Mbps downstream, 256 Kbps upstream internet connection is required.
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