The Way to Femtocell

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The industry may be consumer-driven these days: but we're still stumbling towards consumers in an engineer-facing manner. Don't get me started on how bad the word "cloud" is for the next revolution in ITC. We might have done even worse and tried to sell it as "fog" but cloud is bad enough.

MicrocellOne of my pet peeves is the choice of "femtocell," a product that almost every telco service provider wants to put into the hands of as many consumers as possible. For a couple years now, I have-- in industry speeches-- asked manufacturers to re-consider their terminology if they really wanted to sell this product.

In fact, it would pay most telcos to give away this product to consumers but by labeling it "femtocell," we've crippled ourselves. You have telecom executives pondering why Apple can come in and dominate mobile phones...and on the one hand, you have a company selling "Apples, Macs, iPhones, MacBookAir..." and on the other hand you have stodgy wirepullers offering their "femtocell" to the public. Really, it sounds like something you mind find in a pharmacy...

What's in a word? A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. But if florists tried to sell the idea of a "femto-rose" for Valentine's Day to the mass market , we'd be the first group to rollicking in laughter-- imagine the marketing genius who thought that up!

The first sign of intelligence comes from AT&T and you can see in this link that they don't mention "femtocell" at all and their "Microcell" becomes much more easily marketed. This femtocell unit is actually from Cisco/Scientific Atlanta but will be more readily adopted as AT&T zeroes in on the marketing.

We get so immersed in our technology, our own world...that the obvious escapes us at times. The eradication of "femtocell" is a good start...now if we can just do something about "cloud..."

Go AT&T "Microcell"