The cells still need a backhaul. Where are you going to get that? You need a longer range for a backhaul so it doesn't make sense to a bunch of little lightcubes if you only have a backhaul at a few locations. Your backhaul box will be large. 

What kind of function is integated inside of hte cube, does the baseband processing is also included?

Thanks, yarn, that makes sense. I must watch that webcast replay.

If I recall correctly the answer was that unlike a femto-cell, a single cube has a larger range of a few hundred meters and can serve many more sessions, instead of a single home/small business as femtocells do. Also the cubes could be clustered to built the functional equivalent of current base stations, if high density is needed.

The question of whether lightRadio was a femto or not came up in the press conference, but the answer was a bit fuzzy (or maybe I was messing around with the Flip camera and wasn't listening properly!)

But as I understood it, this is different to a femtocell, it's not the same thing. But eventually small cells and big cells all become part of the same family.

Yeah, really small!

AlcaLu talked about putting the cubes on lamposts, at the bus stop, on telephone poles... Basically they have to be located where there is a power supply and where there's a suitable backhaul connection.

I think maintaining lots of little pieces of very sophisticated equipment could be quite a challenge for operators.

This is just the beginning of the story - I expect to hear more about all of this next week.

The modules are meant for the "big" base stations. Basically, each cube is a self contained amplifier and antenna. To replace one of the big antennas, you stack 8, 12 or 16 modules at a given distance from each other, forming the array seen inside one of the big antennas of yore. You just run power and a fiber connector to this module.

Alcalu is certainly hyping up this project but several technical concerns have not been answered.

1. How does the RF part work? Typically base stations have those large antennas mounted on even larger poles. Or is this meant only for Femto market?

2. If Femto, what's the big deal? How is ti different from say AT&T's aircell which is pretty small as well.

Thanks for the video clips of the event.

Assuming these radios work in existing networks, where do you see them being deployed first?

Also, wouldn't it make trouble-shooting outages more complex with palm-sized devices hiding under every sink, stairwell or whatever?

ph