SlashGear Japan
Prepare for the second-coming of the Samsung femtocell, last seen on the SlashGear test bench as the Sprint AIRAVE and now, revealed courtesy of the FCC, coming in a new Darth-style suit to Verizon Wireless. Despite cosmetic changes, the principle is the same: plug the femtocell into your broadband connection and it creates its own little bubble of CDMA coverage, within which your Verizon cellphone is king.
Aside from the color change and some new casing moldings, there’s a stubbier aerial too. Sadly the GPS lock system that so disappointed us on the AIRAVE – which refuses to let the femtocell operate if it realizes you’re not in the US – is still present on this Verizon version.
While we were impressed with the hardware when we tested the AIRAVE, and it worked exactly as promised, it was the costing that made us think twice about wholeheartedly recommending it. Here, Verizon can differentiate themselves from Sprint despite using basically the same box: if their pricing policy is fair – i.e. not charging vast quantities for the “privilege” of using your own broadband to make up for poor patches in the Verizon network – then they could be more successful than Sprint have.
[via MobileBurn]
2 Responses to “Verizon Femtocell by Samsung revealed in FCC filing”
anomaly65 November 5, 2008
Cool. Is there any way to make certain my neighbors do NOT get the benefit of this? They “ignorantly” bullied our local zoning board into not allowing VZ to put up a cell tower.
(the irony being that lousy cell service makes your handset up its own power output by 10-100x to maintain a connection, draining your battery with lots more RF right into your “pocket”)
thanks,
NeutralMike November 27, 2008
haha, if it’s like the Sprint one, which it seems to be. you can set a list of 50 phone numbers that are allowed to connect, you should be able to shun them all you like
Neutral