nice idea
But rather than pay for the internet, i rekon they should just give you 30£ off your bill each month and allow all phones to go through your broadband.
I need one and i have been waiting months for a femto cell from vodafone !!!
Free ADSL and a free femtocell, but you still have to pay for mobile calls: Japanese punters now have a new business model from SoftBank Mobile. Rather than offer better coverage, or discounted calls, SoftBank Mobile is turning the femtocell business around by offering free ADSL to anyone who'll extend the operator's coverage …
Having a bunch of OFDM (whether LTE or WiMax) femtocells is a terrible idea!
OFDM uses a bunch of narrow band carriers for data transport. These carriers must be allocated between transmitting sites so as not to have interference among the different transmitters, be those transmitters the base station, femtocell, or mobile. The carrier allocation needs to be under the control of the area SoftBank (for example) infrastructure - that means much more control channel traffic to/from the femtocells, base stations, and mobiles, and extra computing power for the allocation algorithm to deal with the new femtocells!
This could all go horribly wrong. With cdma it works easily, with OFDM, NOT!