With the emergence of mobile broadband data services, operators are looking to find new ways and cost models to facilitate the delivery of wireless service capacity to subscribers.
Femtocells have emerged as one possible solution for mobile in-home service delivery–targeting residential and small-business markets. A femtocell is a compact mobile base station, typically in the form factor of a residential gateway, targeting the in-building environment of subscribers.
A key obstacle of femtocell adoption is the cost of such deployments–not just the equipment, but also the installation and maintenance cost of such a large number of small, but relatively complex, mobile base station devices.
