A couple of online publications recently quoted AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom on the positioning of their residential femto (marketed as 3G MicroCell):
 
"3G MicroCell is primarily intended to enhance the voice call quality experience in your home. While it can carry mobile data traffic, that's not the primary solution it provides. Wi-Fi is the optimal solution for home mobile data use. We encourage people to take advantage of Wi-Fi capabilities — that's why all of our smartphones include Wi-Fi radios, and usage on Wi-Fi doesn't count against your mobile data usage bucket."
 
Makes sense.  Maybe statements like that will help quell some of the Wi-Fi vs. femto “controversy.” There’s no cage match between Wi-Fi and femto; they fight in different weight classes. Femtos solve an indoor voice coverage problem – and that seems to be a problem that consumers are willing to pay to fix. In fact, if you have good in-building voice coverage, you don’t want a femto because it could create unnecessary interference with the macro network, not to mention the upfront and ongoing costs. 
 
So where does that leave femto as a data offload solution?  Clearly, data offload is not the primary driver for femtos. That being said, if you deploy femtos to address your voice coverage issue, you can, if you choose, also offload data traffic onto them. But, as has already been widely published, this use of femtos does contribute to data usage for the purpose of caps. 

Then again, femtos are currently being primarily positioned for residential and small-medium sized businesses. Last time I looked, those weren’t the areas suffering from network-crippling data congestion. Whether you agree with the concept or not, you can likely understand the motivation of a consumer or small business to pay for better voice coverage in their building. But, it’s impossible to understand why any consumer or small business would willingly pay to fix a capacity problem that they don’t really have and that doesn’t seem to exist.
 
I’m not denying the reality of data congestion in mobile networks – but it doesn’t come from residential or small business usage. At least, not yet. Mobile data congestion happens in areas of high user concentration; busy downtown streets and intersections (which may, it’s true, include some small businesses), stadiums and special events, hotels and convention centers, at trains stations and on commuter trains, and at universities and even hospitals. What do service providers use to deal with data congestion in these high traffic areas? Not femtos. At least, not from what I’ve seen. 
 
AT&T recently announced it had launched a pilot Wi-Fi project in Times Square, one of the “busiest locations in the world,” positioning it as “an additional mobile broadband option in areas with consistently high 3G traffic and mobile data use.”  Or, as VON/xchange Executive Editor Tara Seals reported: “AT&T is testing a free, oversized Wi-Fi hot spot in New York City's Times Square, to offload traffic from slammed Manhattan cell towers.”

In their shiny newness, femtos may just be suffering from a bit of overzealous promotion.  But things seem to be settling out along the lines of: If you’ve got a voice coverage problem, think femto, if you’ve got a data capacity problem, think Wi-Fi. Horses for courses, as they say.
 
Stephen Rayment is co-founder and chief technology officer of BelAir Networks, the market leader in Service Provider Wi-Fi. He brings more than 20 years of product and technology experience in the telecommunications industry – most of that focused on wireless – and has worked extensively with service providers deploying new wireless technologies.