As more and more people decide to drop their home landlines in favour of mobile phone technology it seems that Femtocells are set to be the next big wireless technology to storm the market. Verizon Wireless and Spring Nextel Corp have joined forces in the US to bring Femtocells to the market and try to gain a market share in this growing area of home telephone technology. So what exactly are Femtocells?

Femtocells act like the base station of cordless phones in that they allow the signal from / to your mobile phone to be amplified throughout your home, ensuring a much better quality of signal than would normally be available. They look very similar to Wi-Fi routers and have been shown to make a massive difference to mobile phone signal quality within the home. But will they catch on?

While the technology is available at the moment the rollout of the service has been a little slower than some had expected and many had predicted. It seems that there is some resistance in having “another electronic box” in the home, but slowly there are signs that this early reticence is lifting. One of the interesting facts about the new Femtocells is way in which they amplify the mobile phone signal around the home, hooking up to in-house DSL or broadband networks ensuring that there is no extra cost when transferring the data from the Femtocells to the mobile phone.

As predicted last year, 2008 seems set to be the year of wireless technology with a host of new and exciting products due to be launched onto the market. The ease with which the majority of these products are accepted by customers bodes well for the future of the sector and also opens up some very interesting and potentially lucrative income streams for the telecom and technology companies.