AT&T Scheduled To Test Femtocells In 2009 – Kills My Hope For UMA

In case you don’t know femtocells are little cell phone towers that piggyback on your home broadband internet connection to provide you cellphone reception in your house. This is perfect for people who have shoddy reception in their apartments or houses. Sprint has already released a femtocell for their network called the Airave. The problem is that Sprint charges and arm and a leg to use it which makes it useless.

The AP is reporting that AT&T will be testing out 3G femtocells next year. Sadly this probably means that AT&T will never try out UMA which just lets you make calls and access the internet over WiFi like T-Mobile does with T-Mobile@Home. I think UMA is a better idea since that just piggybacks on the same technology, WiFi, that many people already have in their homes.

Hopefully AT&T will not charge to use the femtocells like Sprint does. Or better yet they should follow in T-Mobiles footsteps and just deduct your minutes for those calls and offer a paid unlimited plan.

What do you think?

via AP via IntoMobile

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