Vodafone, O2 and 3 all offer* femotcells to people who cant get a signal at home. Mostly iPhone owners lol! Here is a quick overview of their performance.


*Offer can mean having a good moan at them and threatening to leave before they will give you one!


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/07/femtocells/

In my experience O2 would rather lose a customer than issue a femtocell.

As the article mentions, they work and it's a shame they are not more easily available.

Has anyone on a non-business plan managed to obtain a Boost Box from O2?

They are working on an application for smartphones which allows you to make and receive calls over wifi and bill them to your bill or out of your allowance. I'm sure all the networks will have this capability at some point, meaning Femtos aren't needed.

From a personal point of view the Femtocell may only cost the company £25 to manufacture. Therefore it make sense just to give the customer one free to keep them as a customer. A happy customer is more likely to stay. So why argue with them or refuse to give them one?!

£25? and the rest

Didn't there used to be a standard called UMA where a mobile would send calls, texts and data over wifi? Wouldn't it be easier to roll this out than sending out signal boxes? I seem to remember Orange offering this on certain phones.

Yes Orange do, they call it 'Orange signal boost'. I use it on my Galaxy S2 from time to time and it works well.

Do you still need to be an Orange BB customer to use this?

No, doesn't matter who you have for broadband. You just connect your phone to a Wi-Fi router, start the signal boost app and away you go.

The femto itself is expensive, it has to be shipped to the customer, supported, then there's the back end infrastructure that is needed to keep it all highly available and all that generates no additional revenue and distracts from actually putting up more cells and providing better mobile coverage.

As I've already said it will also become totally redundant as there is an application that works over wifi and can run on smartphones to make and receive calls on your mobile number and billed / linked to your account coming out on O2 and the others will follow.

Totally disagree I'm afraid mate. Sorry Femtos keep customers happy. They massively increase your battery life, a wifi app would decrease it. They work without having to do anything at all apart from plug it in. An app could be unreliable and needs to access your contacts and all that stuff. How would an app integrate with visual voicemail and other similar systems.
I don't see it really. My signal box is the best thing I've ever bought. I'd have paid 3 times as much. Anyone who comes into my house with an EE, Orange or T-Mobile (and apparently Virgin) handset suddenly has a full signal without doing anything.
The networks wouldn't be installing all the backend gear if they weren't doing it seriously.

I'm afraid we'll have to disagree, I can't wait for the networks to support this.

You've got a business unit, the consumer ones you have to set up each phone to use it I think on the unit and register them.

Wifi doesn't use that much battery, the app would be perfectly reliable and visual voicemail is really just an Apple thing, most networks don't support it I don't think.

The other advantages is that the app will work anywhere where your phone gets a wifi signal, at home, work, even on a tube concourse or platform underground.

Why have a separate hardware device when the phone has a wifi connection and software that can do the same thing. Wifi is not a massive battery drainer I don't think and it's likely to be plugged in or docked at home anyway.

i have the vodafone sure signal box that plugs into the broadband and acts as a cell. It works with most 3G phones unlike Orange's box - and without it I wouldn't get a signal on any network. With it I have full 3G signal - all for £50 one off fee and you can register lots of phones to it.

Ok I'll give you that. Not going to go all "Wave" on you Hahahahaha!
So this is just an app that would be downloaded from the App Store in the normal way? This begs the question why didn't they do this ages ago instead of chasing UMA?
Any ideas?
Are there any links to info on this?

Some info http://www.cultofmac.com/177878/o2s-...-on-your-ipad/

So that software is not doing the same job as a femtocell

all that software is doing is sharing your phone signal with other devices. if you have no signal on the phone you are still going to need a femtocell

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news...o2-tu-go-85350

No it's using wifi to send and receive calls and texts from your number, billed out of your allowance and it's available on multiple devices, so tablets or your smartphone.

So now it sounds like something different, that first article definitely suggests to me that the other devices link to your phone

Yeah that's not very well written, there's lots of talk of it on the O2 forums though. It was meant to be out by now but it's been delayed by the sounds of it.


So you can make and receive calls via your number, charged to your allowance on any Andoid or IOS device over mobile data or wifi.

It says it embeds VoIP into the OS. How's that going to work on iOS. Would apple allow this? It says it will be available for iOS.
It does say not all phones will work particularly Blackberry.

Has anyone got an o2 femto? If so please could you PM me and tell me how the heck you got one? Thank you

Telefonica plan to sell this to other networks after acquiring the technology, I guess they have been working with Apple.

On the other side it save the network from building a cellsite which is costly. They will save on electricity and bandwidth as the customer will be paying for that It also increases the likelyhood of the customer staying especially if there are other customers who are in the same household using the same femtocell.

Maybe O2 should have done this for their 3G coverage and simply tell Ofcom we have 100% 3G coverage

No because they still have to have the cell sites and well, and they always will as a cellular network as femtos only allow a limited number of connections.