AT&T Announces Nationwide Plans for 3G Microcell

Yesterday AT&T announced that it will begin the nationwide roll out of its 3G MicroCell device in April.  The device is a femotcell (read NTCA’s ePaper on femtocells) and according to the press release “… is an innovative solution that allows residential customers to route wireless phone calls and data connections (or sessions) across a home broadband connection. This solution is designed to benefit customers who live in homes that have coverage impediments that consistently interrupt wireless spectrum, such as dense wall and roof construction or unfavorable terrain. ”

So basically if your customer is an A&T wireless subscriber, with this device, AT&T will be migrating traffic from its towers to your customer’s broadband connection.  Oh, and if AT&T service was spotty in your customer’s homes, well, this solves that also.

We’ve seen femtocells as a threat for some time now, and to my knowledge AT&T is the first femtocell device to support both voice and 3G wireless access.  Some early reports on Verizon’s Network Extender were pretty harsh, with the most criticism stemming from the lack of 3G support (for phones that lack WiFi), open access (meaning anyone near the femtocell could use it to make calls), and the fact that calls made over the broadband connection continued to “eat” minutes.

I’m shocked that the latter complaint hasn’t been addressed by AT&T.  Calls made from their MicroCell will still use plan minutes, unless of course you opt for their “companion rate plan” and pay an additional $19.99 a month to make unlimited calls, and of course for the privilege of offloading traffic from their towers.

Stay tuned.  We’ll see if the device takes off or not later in the year.  If there was a silver lining in this story, I suppose rural telcos might gain some additional broadband subscribers.  But if this works well and is successful, I question if additional traffic on the network will negate any benefit.

Related posts:

1. U.S. Cellular Announces LTE Plans
2. Alcatel Lucent Announces lightRadio, New Base Station Architecture
3. Nationwide WiMAX Operator Selects Alvarion
4. LightSquared to Build Nationwide, Wholesale 4G Network
5. AT&T Quietly Removes Unlimited Data Plans