Ubiquisys to Combine 3G Femtocells with FON Based Wi-Fi Sharing

­Femtocell vendor, Ubiquisys has teamed up with Wi-Fi community, FON to combine Ubiquisys femtocell and FON wireless community technologies. The combination is aiming to offers mobile operators new opportunities to create communities based on the use of high-speed mobile data using a new generation of "femto fonera" devices that allow spare 3G capacity in the femtocell to be shared securely.

"I'm very excited to be working with FON, a company that shares our vision of improving people's lives through distributed, intelligent wireless technology," said Chris Gilbert, CEO Ubiquisys. "Femtocells introduce new elements to the community concept, making the experience for users even simpler, providing a lightweight architecture for presence-based community applications, and adding the reassurance of the existing trust relationship with mobile operators"

FON community members, known as Foneros, share some of their home Internet connection and in return gain access to free Community FON Spots around the world. Fon's Community Wi-Fi router, Fonera, allows Foneros to share Wi-Fi in a secure environment.

Combining these technologies brings the potential to evolve a new generation of wireless communities where cellular mobile is fully involved. For example, users would benefit from automatic presence-triggered authentication, where the mobile operator controls the access rights.

Femto Foneras could be in homes and offices, but equally in retail and public spaces, both urban and rural. FON and Ubiquisys are in discussion with several mobile operators to evaluate the Femto Fonera concept.

Posted to the site on 15th September 2009