Confirmed, Femtocell A Rip

Well shucks I have been saying for quite some time that Femtocell was a total rip. But folks say I am a lone voice in the wilderness on the issue. Well no more –

Even if I’m willing to pay $150 to extend AT&T’s shitty 3G network, it will only be accessible to 10 lines, and it will almost certainly be a pain in the ass to add or remove lines. So, when my iPhone toting friends are down to play Rock Band, they too can enjoy getting 5 voice mails the moment they leave the house, each from a call that never rang inside the AT&T black hole that is my home. There is one spot of good news here though, buried at the end of the paragraph: AT&T has decided graciously not to charge me a monthly fee for the privilege of fixing its network. But wait, that sentence right before it, about the minutes? Does that mean I’m still going to be charged for minutes, even when dialing out over my broadband connection instead of AT&T’s spendy wireless network? Are they fucking kidding me?

In addition, AT&T will offer a companion rate plan option for MicroCell customers – especially customers on Family Talk plans — who want to supplement their existing voice plans. For $19.99 a month, individual or Family Talk customers can make unlimited calls through a 3G MicroCell, without using minutes in their monthly wireless voice plan.

Oh I get it now. This is a revenue opportunity. You know, for AT&T. For $150 down, I can use my broadband connection to extend AT&T’s shitty network, but if I don’t want those calls to eat my minutes I have to pay ANOTHER $20 a month? This is extortion.

So what is the problem? Well I think the blog entry at Tested lays it out pretty well. Link.

But in every grey cloud could be a silver lining. Somebody, anybody get hold of one of those microcells and lets dig into the internals. If we could reverse engineer it, chances are we could turn the tables. AT&T would not have much incentive to deploy this if they knew that with just a .BIN file upload you could have your cell phone operating for free!

Think about it.