A femtocell (AT&T's is pictured left) is a mini cell tower you connect to your broadband internet to extend the cellular signal of your cell carrier via your broadband connection. The device installs like a typical WiFi router would and increases the cellular coverage in dead or over-subscribed areas where normal cell service is failing or unavailable. The range of a femtocell is small and while your phone sees no difference between a femtocell and the big cell towers atop buildings, femtocells are usually setup to allow only 5 to 10 pre-specified phones to connect at a time and in AT&Ts case can only offer 3G speeds if your Internet connection is fast enough to support it (3.5Mbps).The recent pilot program to test AT&Ts femtocells in Charlotte, North Carolina raises some interesting question as to how the company is going to deploy and use femtocells to address widespread and well documented service failures in New York, San Fransisco and other major metro areas where the wild success of the iPhone has caused over subscription and saturation of the cell towers. The result of which is 20-30% of iPhone calls result in a dropped or fail connection NYC. Things have gotten so bad on AT&T that my girlfriend went out and got a second Verizon based phone just for work calls, forwarded her iPhone to it and now takes calls on this crappy little LG phone, that is how much her AT&T calls were dropping.
In the Charlotte femtocell pilot program AT&T has set the cost at a onetime (and in my opinion outrageous) $150 hardware fee. With the option of paying an additional $20 monthly to make unlimited calls via the femtocell you install and supply the backhaul internet connection for. If you choose not to add the unlimited femtocell calling plan then all calls (femtocell based or not) use minutes from your std plan just as it would normally.
Just to clarify, I live in the middle of Manhattan, not on the side of a mountain upstate and I don't know about you, but when I last checked AT&T's coverage map, the West Village was square in the middle. To think AT&T is suggesting I pay an additional $150 to provide me the coverage they promised me when I signed up just because they can't keep up with demand is outrageous.
I expect AT&T to give any user, within a coverage area that is known to be experiencing over subscription and network capacity problems, a FREE femtocell upon request. I also want a discount on my AT&T bill every month to offset the cost of the high-speed broadband connection I will have to provide to use the femtocell.
Or AT&T can sit back and watch as we all switch to a different carrier the moment they offer the iPhone. Wake up AT&T, we are not with you cuase of brand loyatly or your outstanding service, we are with you because we had no choice, it is Apple we love, NOT AT&T and unless you do something about your troublesome network we will dump you as soon as the opportunity arises. Did you really think your network services are anything other than a replaceable commodity AT&T?
Or another alternative is that AT&T can ignore us, but what is that smell?
[sniff, sniff]
Does anyone else smell a "class action lawsuit", or is it just me?
Make a comment below and send AT&T a clear signal. We want what they promised us and what we payed for in good faith. How many of you would switch to another carrier if they offered the iPhone too? How many of you would forgive AT&T and stay if they gave you a free femtocell for home or work?
Relevant Links:
* Is there a business case for femtocells?
* Study points to network weakness as source of iPhone 3G woes
* Apple Genius says dropped AT&T calls in NYC 'consistent'
* What is going on with AT&T coverage in NYC
[sniff, sniff]
Does anyone else smell a "class action lawsuit", or is it just me?
Make a comment below and send AT&T a clear signal. We want what they promised us and what we payed for in good faith. How many of you would switch to another carrier if they offered the iPhone too? How many of you would forgive AT&T and stay if they gave you a free femtocell for home or work?
Relevant Links:
* Is there a business case for femtocells?
* Study points to network weakness as source of iPhone 3G woes
* Apple Genius says dropped AT&T calls in NYC 'consistent'
* What is going on with AT&T coverage in NYC
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