A new breed of femto-based applications and services
As mobile social networking, video streaming and other data intensive services become central to home life, enjoyment of a great mobile data experience becomes critical. But perhaps even more interesting are a totally new set of services that are created when a femtocell is situated in the home.
These new femto-based services come in two distinct flavours:
- Femtozone services: web/voice services that are triggered when the phone comes in range of the femtocell
- Connected Home services: where the phone accesses the home LAN via the femtocell, enabling it to share data with, and control, a range of home networked devices.
Femtozone services
Typical examples include:
- Receive an SMS when your kids enter or leave the home
- Automatic “I’m at home” profile / presence update on Plazes and other Web 2.0 sites
- Automatic podcast reload & photo/video upload to the web (Flickr, YouTube etc) when you get home
- Virtual home number (rings all mobile phones currently in the home).
The key to enabling femtozone services is a triggering mechanism that's activated when the phone arrives home and camps onto the femtocell. This triggering can come from two places:
- An application in the phone (which uses an API to detect the femtocell ID and initiate an action – e.g. large file transfers), or…
- From the network (e.g. the Femtocell Access Point or Femto Gateway initiates an SMS message or a presence update on a Web 2.0 service when it detects the phone has entered the femtozone).
Connected Home services
Connected Home services use the femtocell to route traffic locally between the phone and a home LAN – so the femtocell not only provides a way for the phone to access operator services and the internet, but also services on the home network.
Typical examples include:
- Back up music downloaded on your phone to your PC
- Play a slide show of photos from your phone on your TV
- Stream videos from your DVR to your phone at high quality
- Use your phone to control other devices in the home (e.g. to instruct the HiFi to play music stored on a home media server).
Of course, the Connected Home industry already envisages mobile devices accessing the home LAN via WiFi or Bluetooth, and applications using the Universal Plug’n'Play standard (UPnP) are already available for high-end smartphones. But femtocells will open up these applications to any 3G phone, and at the same time make them much simpler to use. For example, there'll be no need to (re)configure WiFi or Bluetooth settings on the phone – currently a real barrier to mass market adoption.
