[caption id="attachment_102330" align="alignleft" width="300"] Guy Sene, Keysight Technologies senior vice president of measurement solutions and worldwide sales[/caption]
SANTA ROSA -- In the fourth fiscal quarter of 2014, the newly stand-alone Keysight Technologies launched a device designed to test femtocells -- tiny cellular base stations that boost wireless phone performance up to about 30 feet in homes and small businesses.
“We introduced the industry’s first one-box tester dedicated to femtocell manufacturing,” said Ron Nersesian, Keysight’s CEO and president.
Santa Rosa-based Keysight, which makes electronic measurement instruments, spun off from Agilent Technologies, based in Santa Clara, at the beginning of August. Keysight stock began to trade independently on Nov. 3.
A femtocell can be used in homes or small businesses in dense urban areas or in high-mobility applications such as a car on a freeway. A standard cellular base transceiver station has a range of about 22 miles depending on tower height and location.[poll id="145"]
The term femtocell is not a scientific name. The prefix femto comes from the Danish or Norwegian word femten, meaning 15. A femtosecond is a quadrillionth (10 to the minus-15 power) of a second -- a millionth of a billionth. The sequence in fractions of a second goes like this millisecond (thousandth), microsecond (millionth), nanosecond (billionth), picosecond (trillionth) and femtosecond (quadrillionth). But a femtocell range is less than four-thousandth the range of a regular base station or “macrocell.” So “femto” is used colloquially in femtocell to simply indicate small size.
A femtocell can extend service coverage indoors or at the cell edge where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. For a mobile operator, a femtocell can boost coverage and capacity, especially indoors, with improved voice quality and battery life.
“You could imagine them in buses,” said Guy Sene, Keysight’s senior vice president of measurement solutions and worldwide sales. The technology resembles wireless local-area networks but is for cellular phone connections.
Companies that build technology infrastructure such as Ericsson or Alcatel-Lucent work constantly to increase the density of the network, Mr. Sene said. But big antennas cannot continue to proliferate in every outside space in order to maintain cellular signal strength. Hence the need for femtocells.
“The femtocell is used to offload bigger towers and increase the quality of service," he said. "It’s one of the many things being looked at from the industry to expand the reach and quality of the network.”
Correction, Dec. 1, 2014: Agilent Technologies is based in Santa Clara. The original version had inaccurate information.
