Femtocell - Suresignal from Vodafone

I recently got my hands on a femtocell from Vodafone. Vodafone are calling their femtocell product Sure Signal. The device basically plugs into your home broadband and broadcast a 3G signal locally in your home. You then register your SIMs by filling out a form on the Vodafone website and Vodafone allow these SIMs access to your Sure Signal.

My experience to date has been reasonably good. You cannot configure the Sure Signal and the only ports that appear to be open are port 8 for ICMP and port 4500. On power on the Sure Signal receives an IP address from your home DHCP server and then establishes an IPSEC tunnel back to Vodafone using port 4500.

Once the tunnel is up the network light on the Sure Signal stays on. Whenever you make a call the phone light on the SURE Signal lights up. That is it. Nothing more.

One thing I think is confusing is Vodafone use a red light to indicate that the box is powered on. Naturally people think this means there is a problem with the box, but no it just indicates that the device is powered on.

Also on the way from Vodafone is an online method to view your registered SIMs.

I would like to know what decision criteria is used for your phone to switch between the external 3G base station and your home femtocell. While clearly the signal strength is involved in the decision, sometimes my phone takes longer than other times to switch.

Also I have found that sometimes powering off/on the phone is the easiest way to ensure that the phone uses the femtocell. So I have gone from 1bar to 5 bars!

The big question for me, is how long will this home femtocell market last. I can see the demand for femtocells in large shopping centers/venues, where the operator has to install/own the femtocell but as a residential product I think it will be short lived. 3G-Wifi Interworking is already on the horizon with trials and tests ongoing. As most home already have Wifi, 3G-Wifi interworking makes a lot more sense.

More info:

http://www.vodafone.ie/mobilephoneservices/suresignal/

Freesat

Well after years of talking about putting up a satellite dish to get Freesat TV from the BBC and ITV, I finally took the plunge and did it.

To be honest there is quite a bit of work required to set things up. The biggest job was running a second cable from the dish to each TV in the house. I want to keep the existing coax for DTT(Saorview). So now I have 2 coax cables from the satellite dish and one coax for DTT. Plus a Cat5! As I was pushing cables from the attic to the down stairs between the plaster board and the installation, I never wanted to do this job again.

In terms of cost and what I bought. 50 euro for a quad LNB and 60cm dish from Powercity. 100 meters for RG6(black) from N D Electrical Wholesalers, 14 euro and F type connectors (70 cent each). All small costs but it took me one full day to do the cable runs.

I bought the cheapest HD box I could find in Powercity - 100 euro. There are some very cheap boxes available in the UK. I need to do a bit more research on boxes, but the idea of the two cables from the LNB, is to record on one and watch on the other. There are also now boxes with Ethernet connections, for Internet access. BBC iPlayer is not going to work with an IP address from the Republic. Also now there are Saorview and Freesat boxes in one.

Putting up the dish itself was quite straight forward. A great site that helped me get set up the box is: www.dishpointer.com. It even gives you a green line for giving you an idea of the general direction to point the dish in.

Once I set the elevation on the dish, I used a sat finder to get a rough idea of the direction and then fine tuned it afterwards. The sat finder is very useful as you can use it while moving the dish. The sat finder is powered from the satellite box and is placed inline near the dish. So you can view the sat finder while moving the dish. You really do need a sat finder, I couldn't imagine doing it without one.

Next step is putting up my antenna to get DTT. Once I have my DTT (Saorview) and Freesat, it will be time to declare independence and no more cable bills - except for the TV license of course.