Here's The Latest Way AT&T Is Screwing Its Wireless Customers

That article is pretty harsh. I don't see how AT&T is "screwing you over" by allowing you to optionally buy a home femtocell. The femto is actually part of AT&T's network, uses their licensed spectrum, their core network, etc. and ultimately they give you the terms of use. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But don't whine that AT&T is "screwing me over"

...besides, when you are at home and in range of the femtocell, you should also be in range of your homes wifi system, and you can surf all the data you want on that for free anyway, right?

 

Every carrier is going to charge something one way or another to use a femtocell. Sprint charges $4.99 a month to use their verison (Airave) and I find that to be reasonable.

 

You may have a point. However the fact that you use a T-Mobile logo as your avatar calls into question how objective you can be when commenting about AT&T or any other service provider.

 

I agree with RadioRaiders - the article is a little too harsh. Sometimes things seem worst then they really are.

I have to assume the ATT microcell is meant for people who have spotty or poor voice cellular service in their home. If they NO ATT service at all, they probably went with another carrier anyways.

So the microcell gives them better voice signal and coverage in their home, which they probably already use (except now all spots in their home have good coverage, not just one little corner). True, that means then have also improved their data coverage, but as RR said, they were probably using their wifi for that anyhow.

So for voice, they are just being charged the same minutes they were using already , and if for data, well most likely they are one of the 98% that use less than 2Gb per month anyhow.

So in reality, they are not going to be overcharged, as far as I can see. This is for someone that wants to use their cell phone number and not wifi VIOP in their home. I see it as more for voice rather than data, and then it just comes out of your bucket of minutes and not likely to be more than what was used before.

VF

 

If you're using the femtocell for data, doesn't all your data traffic funnel through the APN and therefore use AT&T's bandwidth (in addition to your own)? It's better for you and AT&T if you also have Wi-Fi enabled.

 

I'm a little confusd by the authors logic. Both voice and data are going:

microcell -> your broadband connection -> AT&T's core network

The author thinks it's ok for voice minutes to be charged, but is outraged that data is charged? Why should one service be free and the other charged? Are these the same people who think SMS should be free because it uses the signalling channel?

PS- If I read one more article about "Do you know the real cost of an SMS?" I'm going to hunt down the author and sit him down and explain how the network works until he either understands, or just gets sick of me talking

 

If AT&T Mobility wants to move as much traffic, voice as well as data, to Wi-Fi, the answer is UMA, just as T-Mobile uses. With UMA, your voice calls can be terminated to your handset with your regular telephone number.

COtech

 

Yea, UMA is a good idea. With UMA you actually can have unlimited data, because the data goes streight from you femtocell to the internet. The only downside is that you need a UMA-enabled handset for that to work. AT&T's femto works with any 3G handset, but the down-side is the traffic goes into their network.

I think AT&T's version in tandem with wifi works just as good as T-Mobile's UMA.

 

My understanding was that you could seamlessly move from the macro-cellular environment to your femtocell, and vice-versa. Since I don't use a femtocell myself, I'm not sure you can actually (reliably) keep a call connected while you move from one to the other. But that was the promise of the technology, if I recall correctly.

Anyway, that said, if calls & data sessions are indeed handed off successfully, then that alone tends to support the carrier cost side of the equation, which of course, must be passed onto the consumer.

Now, if femtocells actually extended the range and coverage of the macro-cellular network to the extent that your neighbors could get a free ride on your internet, then the extra money paid to anyone would be a slap in the face. But it's my understanding that femtocells can't do that (yet?), or that at best, you have to whitelist particular handset devices.

 

Yes, this is correct. When a you start on the ATT 3G microcell, and leave it (i.e. your home) you stay on that connection so your internet data now becomes your 3G data cost. This is probably the logic to ATT's pricing. As an aside, if you pay $20 extra you get unlimited voice calls in the microcell area, AND if you leave, while on a call, that unlimited rate continues for that call.

There is no free ride. The 3G microcell allows up to 4 simultaneously calls, and you must allow those phone numbers 'in' during the set up. You can set up to 10 'in' numbers, but only 4 at a time can call.

See here for a video on the ATT 3G microcell. Covers up to 5,000 square feet. AT&T 3G MicroCell™


PLUS, you set up the service with location, so the Microcell knows your location for E911 services. This is great!!!!

 

ignoring any implementation issues and just looking at what each can do, I don't think they're in the same ballpark. AT&T requires you to get a $150 femtocell and whitelist only 4 phones to use it. T-Mobile's UMA works on a $30 Wi-Fi router or ANY accessible Wi-Fi.

I've heard of people having issues with some random Wi-Fi hotspots, but I've heard issues about people using AT&T's specialized single purpose device too.

That's just due to lack of demand. Let more people find out about it (where is T-Mobile's marketing?) and people will wonder why they paid $150 for a device they have to configure, when they already had a Wi-Fi router.

UMA is just a software stack, and probably firmware upgradeable on nearly every wi-fi phone available. Nokia and RIM did their work and can reuse their stack on their phones, but other manufacturer's dont seem to have any drive to develop their own implementation.

I imagine with the similarity between UMA and IP based calling on LTE and VoRA might make it more likely in the future.

 

Hi Spleck, Good points about UMA, that it's useable on any wifi router and it's not that hard to implement in the phone.

The only negative I would say about UMA is that it's wifi, and wifi is TDD, meaning it's great for data but bad for voice, since TDD uses the same frequency for up and downlink. I never tried UMA, but did try Skype over wifi, and the quality was pretty bad in my experiences. The home femtocell from AT&T is a FDD base-station, so there's dedicated channels for up and downlink, so voice quality should be better than UMA.

 

Thanks for pointing this out RR. I'm considering the MicroCell, and I was worrying about the actual voice quality - I could just get by with normal 3G, but the microcell would cover some dead spots.

From a data point of view, it is a mute point for ATT - most of their customer base (98%)use less than the new 2GB limit (and most of the WA'ers here too). I don't expect them (customers) to exceed that with a microcell- esp. if they can still use wifi. So in reality, it is not a big deal...

I do like that the ATT Cisco 3G Microcell has a GPS on board - and you list your location with ATT also - so it can really be used by E911 - better than just a cell phone alone.

 

Thanks for pointing that out--I'm sure it was a factor in the design, but I don't think its that critical on a typical high-bandwidth Wi-Fi link. I don't know what kind of delay there is between send/receive, but I think you can squeeze low bitrate voice traffic (<24 kbps each way) over a 54 Mbps link without incurring worse delays than PSTN or cellular already give you. You might have issues though on a marginal 1 Mbps link with other traffic. I bet QOS could make a big difference, and as I recall T-Mobile's UMA WAPs were set up with QOS enabled.

I think TDD is more of an issue over cellular type links with larger TTIs or constrained bandwidth.

I don't use Skype regularly, but I'd say any quality issues you had were Skype in general. I've heard some horrible call quality over a wired link. I used to think it was because they didn't have hardware designed for efficient vocoders, but everyone has decent computers now days. I'll have to test out my Gizmo5/SIP service over Wi-Fi to see how it does.

However, I'm sure there are SOME issues with UMA over Wi-Fi and that is why AT&T and VZW who view themselves as higher quality than T-Mobile, have not made any attempts at UMA.

 

It's not just about latency, bandwidth and QoS ...altho of course those 3 are critical (read my page here, scroll to the bottom). It's also about the general structure of wifi, link adaptation, error handeling, etc. it's all designed for data. It's not designed for voice. Plus throw in the fact that it's in the unlicensed 2.4Ghz spectrum where microwave ovens, bluetooth, your neighbors wifi are all external sources of random interference...and really voice over wifi is not something you really want to be doing. :nono:

Of course, I'm showing the "dark side" of UMA here. If you have a clean radio enviornment, and good range to the wifi router, I'm sure UMA can work well also. But given a chioce, I'd take a femtocell over UMA because I know the differences ...plus I've tried both, and have seen a clear difference between them in my own experiences.

 

We shouldn't have to make a choice, or accept the choice made by our carriers--adding UMA does not preclude the use of femtocells.

 

No, for sure femtos and UMA don't have to be and shouldn't have to be mutually exclusive. I was watching an intervew with Martin Cooper ("Inventor of the Cellphone") and he suggests that the carriers need to do all they can to make use of more "smarter ways" to handle the large amounts of traffic on the networks, and UMA and femtos are definitely two ways of doing that. Traditionally, the cellcos have been afraid of wifi for silly reasons, like thinking people would opt out of their cellular data plans and just use wifi instead (...does the BlackBerry Tour come to mind? ). But now the cellcos are realizing that wifi can actually be a benefit to them, because it can take some pressure off their macro-cell network. ...and now that cellcos are "forcing" smartphone buyers to mandatory data plans, this "strategy" also removes the "threat" of wifi and allows cellcos to work with wifi instead of against it.

At the moment AT&T offers a femtocell, and T-Mobile uses UMA. But I don't see any reason why in the future they couldn't use both.

(Jump to about the 19 min mark where he explains more spectrum alone isn't going to solve capacity issues....at the 21min mark he talks about wifi specifically)
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CZ4oLw58ek"]YouTube- The Communicators: Martin Cooper[/ame]

...even having said that tho, I still don't trust wifi all that much for voice, but think it's great for data...