BYOCT (bring your own cellular tower) set to take off
Wireless operators like AT&T and Verizon have an ingenious way to improve service to the roughly 50 percent of all subscribers who complain of poor reception at home:
Buy your own cellular tower.
For $100 and a monthly service charge, U.S. wireless carriers will provide customers with a "femtocell," a miniature cell-phone tower for the home. It's a bit galling that customers should have to pay even more to get reasonable cellular service, but it's looking like a sure bet that the program will take off, as consumers (like myself) are desperate to finally get the quality cellular service for which they've long paid.
The benefits to the carriers, as Businessweek notes, are clear:
It's easy to understand why wireless operators like femtocells. The technology lets them shift some of the burden of adding wireless capacity to their customers. Carriers pay for traditional cell phone towers themselves, of course, and the costs can hit $500,000 per tower. In addition, community opposition to new towers is common and can delay construction for years. Carriers do pay for the femtocell box, which runs about $200 now, but they recoup the cost by reselling the box to consumers for about $100 and collecting ongoing fees for femto service. "There's a dirty little secret," says Tammy Parker, principal analyst at Informa. "The femtocell benefits the carrier more than the end user."
Sign me up. Seriously. Along with many (most?) others, I've long been an unwilling dupe of the cellular industry, paying thousands of dollars over the course of a year for shoddy service. Why? Because there hasn't been an alternative.
Now, however, there's an opportunity to improve the reception of my cellular service, and I admit that I'm happy to be duped again. Anything to improve the service. Where do I sign up?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 





Yay. What a triumph. The free market rules. Whoo. Hoo.
Are the ISPs going to exempt the bandwidth used by hardware like femtocell and "registered" content providers who are completing a business transaction by delivering content to a consumer?
If the ISPs haven't considered such business related exemptions, then they need to start to.
This is no different than MS charging to tighten security on their holey OS.
Steve Jordan has it right, the cell companies should be paying their customers for doing this.
Don't be a sucker.
- by JakeS102 November 6, 2008 7:38 PM PST
- There is nothing new about Cellular repeaters. Willson Amps have been around for many years: wilsonelectronics.com. These amps are within the safe exposure limits yet they increase your cell signal by up to 6X. I have one installed in my vehicle and it works great. If the cell companies start forcing the public to boost their own signal, then they may continue to move to that form of coverage in the future, sticking us with the bill and in the meantime continuing to raise our rates.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(12 Comments)