Cellcom’s Midwest femto app lab

Cellcom may be a small operator in the Midwest, but it has outsized plans for turning the femtocell from a mere indoor coverage solution into a services platform.

The operator is about to embark on its first femtocell project in the next 90 days, offering the miniature base stations to its small business and enterprise customers. Those initial trials will focus on coverage, but according to executive vice president Rob Riordan, Cellcom plans to migrate as quickly as it can to a full suite of fixed mobile convergence (FMC) services in both the home of and business. The result will be the femtocell’s transformation from a coverage extender to a communications and multimedia hub.

Riordan said Cellcom isn’t discarding the advantages of coverage. In fact, good coverage has been one of the key reasons Cellcom has been able to maintain its dominant market position in Northern Wisconsin and Western Michigan despite the presence of Tier I operators there. “We have many more towers than our competitors,” Riordan said. “We have much better coverage, which is why we’ve been dominant. We want to continue that dominance.”

But Riordan believes that looking at the femtocell merely as a coverage solution is a missed opportunity. There will always be holes in the network footprint that a femtocell can fill, and there will always be a subset of customers willing to pay to improve their signal strength at their homes and offices. But if positioned right, femtocells can act as launch point for the connected home or office, allowing the carrier to offer an array of new services while creating more loyal subscribers, Riordan said. Rather than just sell a femtocell to a handful of customers in dead zones, Cellcom wants to put a femto in every home, regardless of whether they have good or bad service, Riordan said. Rather than just sell them voice and data plans, Cellcom wants its consumer customers to rely on it for family tracking, social presence, security and home entertainment services and its business customers to rely on it for unified PBX and virtual office services, Riordan said.

Riordan painted a picture of what he’d like to see in his own home: after his son leaves for school in the morning, Riordan and his wife would like to send him text message reminders of chores throughout the day but through special annotations delay the message until he returns from home and sets foot through the door. Such a presence-based application in the femto gateway would not only know to ship the messages when his son is in its presence, it would also send notifications to Rob and his wife that their son had arrived and the messages were received.

Presence applications are fairly simple, but the applications the femto can support can be much more complex, Riordan said. The femtocell could be used to trigger different user interfaces that highlight different home or work applications. When a customer comes home into the femto zone, the screen of his Android smartphone, for instance, could transform to become a home connectivity console, giving him access to thermostat and lighting controls as well as acting as a remote console for home entertainment functions. At work the screen would suddenly highlight work apps such as enterprise e-mail, calendars and databases.