A festival of femtocells

By David Swift.

In my last post, I discussed how femtocells could be used in the relief effort following a natural disaster.

Femtocells could also be used, temporarily, at planned events such as open-air rock concerts,  religious festivals, mass demonstrations and royal weddings; any event that may see hundreds of thousands people gather in a single location as a one off or once a year only. It is inconceivable that a new macro cell site would be built for such an occasion (and it would still struggle to cope with demand). But public access femtocells could provide coverage for the whole event, or just for stewards and emergency services. Again satellite backhaul or radio links can backhaul traffic out of the site.

Getting good coverage at events like these helps to reinforce a positive view of the mobile operator among subscribers. Certainly the opposite is true. A group friends that go to a Glastonbury Festival for a weekend may want to coordinate with each other while in the many fields, miles from a good macro coverage. If they get lost and then struggle to get even one bar coverage, it will give them a negative view of their service provider. Femtocells can be set up around the site in hours, and the operator can advertise the availability of such (and with it comes the brand reinforcement among a wealthy target audience).

You could also imagine femtocells being use to provide additional coverage at events that are not temporary. Imagine a football stadium or motor racing circuit where every two weeks 50,000 people gather in a very small radius. Boosting the power of nearby Node Bs cannot support the growing demand for mobile data, because it not just voice that subscribers want to access. They may want to upload a video of the goal at half time, or use social media to chat with friends.  Femtocells could provide highly targeted coverage with the capacity to support hundreds of simultaneous data sessions. What’s more, the stadium can offer location-based offers to those in the femtozone (e.g. come to the club shop now for half-priced scarves.) Or the femtos can be set in semi-open mode where registered phones (such as stewards or motor racing teams) have priority over the available capacity. In this way, the femtocell is not temporary, but it is filling a gap that cannot be filled by the macro network.

David Swift is Senior Manager – Product Marketing, Wireless Networks Marketing & Strategy, Alcatel-Lucent