The Magic of the Microcell

There's something different about AT&T's new Microcell from the other femtocells being offered in the U.S. by Verizon Wireless and Sprint. Not only does the Microcell support 3G data, but AT&T isn't charging its customers to use it, which could make it the ultimate extension of AT&T's dual-network strategy to make wireless data ubiquitous without straining the capabilities of its high-speed packet access network. By using a femtocell, a data connection bypasses the two most congested parts of the wireless network: the radio access network — which not only has built-in spectrum, deployment and maintenance costs, but is inherently limited by the amount of spectrum an operator owns — and backhaul transport, which is dependent on expensive fiber links to scale. Instead, the femtocell uses a customer's own home or business broadband connection to tunnel that traffic over the public Internet directly to the network core. And as femtocell technologies improve, the majority of traffic that is bound for the Internet can be offloaded at the femtocell itself, bypassing the operator's network entirely.