TRAI makes the case for femtocells and GSM phones with WiFi support

Posted by Ram Viswanathan

July 8, 2007

The TRAI has figured out something that I felt was obvious, that 60% of all calls on mobile phones are made when the caller or the called person is inside a building.

The Hindu Business Line : Mobile phone calls within buildings account for 60%

According to estimates made by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), about 60 per cent of all mobile phone calls are actually originating or terminating when the subscribers are indoors within buildings such as offices, homes or hotels.

What does this mean for 3G? While 2G GSM coverage is hard to establish indoors without placing indoor antennas and/or repeaters, 3G's indoor coverage would only really be possible if there were pico and femto-cells. So what this estimate of TRAI's boils down to is that there is a recommendation for operators to adopt pico/femto cell architectures as well as investigate WiFi as an alternate means of providing indoor coverage.

Technorati Tags: TRAI, Telecom, 3G, femtocell, picocell

Telecom, Wireless

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