What are Femtocells?

In telecommunications, a femtocell is a small, low-power cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. It connects to the service provider’s network via broadband (such as DSL or cable); current designs typically support two to four active mobile phones in a residential setting, and eight to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors or at the 

cell edge, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. Although much attention is focused on WCDMA, the concept is applicable to all standards, including GSM, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE solutions.

Femtocells have an output power less than 0.1 Watt, similar to other wireless home network equipment, and will typically allow up to about 4 simultaneous calls/data sessions at any time. Mobile phones connected to a femtocell will typically operate at levels similar to other wireless phones used in the home.

Femto cells or femtocells are small cellular telecommunications base stations that can be installed in residential or business environments either as single stand-alone items or in clusters to provide improved cellular coverage within a building. It is widely known that cellular coverage, especially for data transmission where good signal strengths are needed is not as good within buildings. By using a small internal base station - femtocell (femto

cell), the cellular performance can be improved along with the possible provision of additional services.

In 3GPP terminology, a Home NodeB (HNB) is a 3G femtocell. A Home eNodeB (HeNB) is an LTE femtocell.

Typically the range of a microcell is less than two kilometers wide, a picocell is 200 meters or less, and a femtocell is on the order of 10 meters, although AT&T calls its product, with a range of 40 feet (12 m), a "microcell".