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O2, Vodafone trialling indoor mobile phone bases

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CIOL Bureau
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LONDON, UK: Vodafone and Britain's top mobile phone company, O2, are conducting separate trials of a new technology that provides indoor base stations for third-generation mobile phone networks, they said on Monday.

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O2, Britain biggest mobile firm in terms of customer numbers, is working with Japanese electronics group NEC Corp and Google-backed Ubiquisys to trial a small, low-power indoor base station called femtocell, designed to

provide 3G coverage at lower cost.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company by revenue, is also carrying out technical trials in Spain with both Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, it said.

The femtocell devices are plugged into a customer's broadband Internet connection and allow users to make calls or use data services with their regular 3G mobile phones.

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Calls made through the femtocell could be priced more cheaply to encourage consumers to use their mobile phones instead of their fixed line.

O2 began the initial period of testing in February and will roll the trial out to around 500 users across the country in the summer if successful.

A commercial launch could then take place by early 2009.

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"Our Apple iPhone is already driving unheard-of levels of mobile Internet usage, and the introduction of flat-rate data tariffs is expected to increase this further," Vivek Dev, chief operating officer of Telefonica O2 Europe said.

"Both of these place huge capacity demands on our networks, and because so much of that usage is at home, femtocells coupled with DSL (broadband) could provide an alternative capacity resource."

O2 won the deal to bring Apple's iPhone to Britain last year.

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Vodafone said it was carrying out technical trials of 3G femtocells to assess how effective the technology could be.

"Femtocells have the potential to enhance customers' 3G broadband experience, and the trials are critical to investigate whether the technology can deliver on its promise," Andy MacLeod, Global Networks Director of Vodafone, said in a statement.

In a report last year provided by NEC, ABI Research forecast the market for femtocell equipment could grow to more than $4 billion by 2012.

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