What were those marketing folks thinking? Seriously, this got me jumpy. I think many other telecommunications engineers would be jumpy at this naming too.
AT&T, a US telecommunications provider, recently announced a product called “3G MicroCell” that promises better signal strength at 3G data speeds. Essentially, it’s a wireless access point that plugs into the internet but instead of giving out WiFi, it gives out mobile phone signals. It’s the US way of fixing their rather patchy mobile service.
While people think that it is magic that gives full bars of mobile phone reception with the product, it’s actually worth noting that the concept has been around for a while. What’s more, this strategy for cellular expansion is actually called called “femtocell”. That’s right, not micro-, not nano-, not pico- but femto-.
To clarify things a bit, the reason why calling this a “MicroCell” is bad is because a microcell is actually almost like a regular mobile phone cell tower (except it’s smaller and has less range) that is put in places where calls tend to be congested in order to give it a bit more capacity. The thing that plugs into your home broadband is way too small to be even considered being called a microcell.