Jan 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Lynnette Luna

Dual-mode Wi-Fi services and femtocells, also known as home base stations, are expected to proliferate in a big way in the coming years as nearly all mobile operators plan to push one or the other at consumers as a cost-effective way to boost coverage and offload peak traffic. With potentially thousands of mobile customers buying these little boxes to boost their coverage and with a large share of 911 calls coming from mobile devices, the ability to identify the location of a mobile call when it is routed through a femtocell has the potential to be both problematic and advantageous to the public-safety community.

A femtocell is a type of cellular base station shrunk down to the size of a Wi-Fi router and connected to the broadband Internet connection, such as DSL or cable, to handle several mobile devices. Within the femtocell coverage area, voice and data calls approved to use the femtocell are carried through the femtocell itself and not through the main mobile network. These calls are connected via a licensed interface, such as GSM, CDMA or WiMAX. Dual-mode Wi-Fi services operate in a similar manner, with calls placed over a Wi-Fi network when within range of an access point and handed over to a licensed interface when out of range.

According to ABI Research, the femtocell market is primed to grow from just under $72 million in 2008 to more than $1.8 billion in 2013, with a compound annual growth rate of more than 300%. As these types of services proliferate and customers begin to view them as primary communications tools, operators will have to ensure 911 services are delivered at the same level of today's wireless 911 capabilities or even better — which could prove to be challenging given their technical architectures and the uncertain regulatory framework that surrounds them when it comes to 911.

“Simply put, if you dial 911, you expect someone to take care of you,” said Todd Young, vice president of marketing for location-technology vendor Rosum. “The last thing the femtocell industry needs is newspaper articles like we saw with early VoIP 911, where the ambulance was sent to the wrong place.”

While femtocells are designed to be kept in a fixed location such as the home — theoretically making it easier for first responders to pinpoint a location — many of the femtocells in the market today include an antenna. As the range of these antennas increases, callers could be far from the actual base station, making it difficult to accurately pinpoint them, said Roger Hixson, director of technical issues for the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), which has established a working group to tackle the 911 issues associated with both femtocells and dual-mode Wi-Fi services.

“The primary issue from a 911 standpoint is identifying the location of the caller because of the way the femtocell is connected into the cellular network,” Hixson said. “Mobile calls are usually identified with a specific address associated with where the antenna is placed. But the antennas have enough range that the caller could be at a different physical address.”

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