Better cell phone use at home on the horizon

This is this reason why T-Mobile started their Hotspot @Home service:

Ask the folks at T-Mobile USA why most people switch mobile-phone providers and they’ll tell you it’s not because of poor customer service or high-priced call plans. Consumers’ main reason for seeking a new carrier? They can’t get good network coverage inside their homes, where anywhere from 27% to 41% of all wireless minutes are spent.

Hotspot @Home might just be the beginning, though. Many companies, including Motorola and Google, are busy researching femtocell, a technology that will make for clearer in-house calls:

It’s known as a femtocell, and it acts as an in-home wireless access point. The femtocell looks like a typical modem or router and uses a high-speed Internet connection, rather than the wireless network, to convey a call from a handset to the carrier’s switching station, where it’s directed to its destination.

Of course, there are plenty of questions to ask about this kind of technology, including that about minutes usage. Hey, the call clarity would be great, but if we’re still using anytime minutes, we’re not as big a fans. According to experts, femtocell technology could even replace our existing WiFi systems in the future. WiFi service is sometimes spotty, and it is said to drain handset batteries faster (though we have no first-hand experience with that). There is also an enormous benefit to wireless carriers, which makes us think this might actually happen:

Femtocells also carry potential benefits to wireless service providers. By letting users bypass wireless towers when making a call, femtocells can boost a wireless network’s capacity by up to 1,500 times, Gilbert says. Calls placed from a home would no longer clog the portion of the wireless network used by the caller. Femtocells could help carriers reduce costs of providing service by more than $70 billion by 2012, according to ABI Research.

Nice. So they have a lower operating cost, and we have better — and hopefully cheaper — calls in our homes. It seems too good to be true at this point, but we’re at least a little optimistic. [BusinessWeek]]]>