Stephen Temple

I sat in the Science Museum last week listening to a panel of distinguished speakers talk about the future of UK mobile radio. Dr Mike Short from O2 highlighted the mobile machine to machine future (well worth returning to in a future blog). But following him was a number of speakers emphasising the mobile broadband Internet as the centre piece of the mobile radio future and, in particular, this would be driven by what customers wanted. I could easily buy-into the mobile broadband piece but I was not too sure how the mobile operators’ business models might survive giving customers all that they wanted from a future broadband mobile Internet.

This left me rolling the tape forward to see where a pure customer driven vision would take the industry…most customers will want their mobile broadband Internet to deliver the same experience as they enjoy over their fixed broadband Internet – in terms of delivered speeds, down-load caps and levels of subscription. (and unlike the fixed broadband Internet – they will also expect their mobile phones to be heavily subsidised).

…at first sight this looked an impossible dream…at least for a profitable mobile phone company.

Enter in the nick of time… the femto cell…indeed one was auctioned for charity at the Science Museum dinner that evening to celebrate 25 years of mobile radio in the UK.

Why do I believe the femto cell is so critical to the success of the mobile broadband Internet?

My involvement in both fixed and mobile broadband strategy developments has led me to the view that cellular mobile radio will never be able to compete head-to-head with the wire line broadband Internet on data speeds or data caps or £ per GB shipped – certainly with 3G technology or for that matter with 4G technology as well…and it is mad to even try!

Looking from the outside at the strategies the UK mobile operators appear to be adopting the choice appears to be one of three broad options. The first is to try to go head to head with the fixed broadband Internet. The result (in my view) will be for mobile network coverage to shrink (impact of cell breathing), speeds to crash over the busy periods and eventually run out of road as the available radio spectrum runs out…as it will.

The second is to price the service and set monthly data caps to steer the mobile broadband Internet towards being limited mainly to down-loading web pages, very short video clips and sending e-mails and to firmly steer users away from using their mobile phones for any heavy lifting applications.  This makes a lot of sense and the operator that manages to attract a disproportionate number of light Internet mobile users has a good business in the making.

The third is to place the femto cell at the centre of the broadband mobile network strategy.

The femto cell is a small privately owned radio base stations sitting in the home connected to the DSL (or Cable Modem) access. It could be a WiFi (if the mobile handset is WiFi enabled, but since most are not, a 3G radio connection is likely to be the more useful over the next few years. Its function is to lift all of the Internet data traffic from a mobile off the cellular wide area network and onto the householder’s fixed broadband Internet access.  It makes perfect sense. It is when the user is at home that they are most likely to have the time and focus to do all the things that generate huge amounts of Internet data traffic. £ for £ it will cost a lot less to subsidise a user (particularly heavy users) to buy a femto cell than to build new local base stations  in order to be able to lift the ever rising amount of Internet data traffic generated from the home. Let the fixed wire line broadband provider take the strain (pain) of shipping 10’s of GB of data!  (another topic I will be returning to in a future blog)

Whilst I can see the strategic importance of the femto cell to the industry I would not pretend to know all the technical detail…but I know a man who does… Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum and the forum Web site  http://www.femtoforum.org would be a good next port of call for the essential survival kit for the mobile broadband Internet future.