Orange is looking to improve Onsite Coverage

[Barry]

Orange is looking to improve mobile-over-DSL technology for existing customers. The Onsite Coverage service will improve mobile phone coverage at sites in remote or densely-built areas by installing a PicoBTS, or small mobile base station, on or near their premises.

France Télécom, has tested the service with customers in Switzerland and plans to introduce it there at the start of next year, extending the service to its mobile networks in France, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. later in the year.

Orange and others have launched services allowing consumers to connect Wi-Fi base stations to their home broadband connections, and to place calls through them using UMA. UMA uses the GSM SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) to authenticate the caller in order to determine who to bill and which calling number to present. The goal of UMA services is to improve indoor coverage, and to allow the customers to make cheaper calls when using the Wi-Fi broadband connection, thus capturing additional revenue that might go to other fixed-line operators.

U.K. operator BT Group was one of the first to offer a consumer UMA service, branding it Fusion. Orange has launched a service in France, the U.K. and elsewhere, known variously as Unik or Unique, while in June T-Mobile announced the rollout across the U.S. of a service it had tested in Seattle.

Orange already offers to install mobile repeaters to provide additional coverage or capacity in sites such as business parks, but these use expensive leased lines to haul traffic back to the mobile network backbone. The advantage of Onsite Coverage is that it can use cheaper DSL connections wherever the fixed line network is accessible.

The PicoBTS transmitters Orange will use for Onsite Coverage have a range of 50 meters. They can handle voice calls, text messages and GPRS data connections for e-mail and so on for up to 50 users, the company said. If more range or more capacity is needed, they can install another transmitter.

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