T-Mobile Venture Funds, the investment arm of T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom, announced on Monday that it had invested an undisclosed sum in a home-networking company called Ubiquisys. Ubiquisys has been focusing on Femtocells, which are small, low-powered mobile cell phone base stations that are designed to improve local signal coverage and use a wired home broadband connection to connect back to the carrier.
T-Mobile has been dabbling in the home networking market recently with its HotSpot@Home service, which allows users to seamlessly transfer phone calls from a cellular network to a home WiFi network and back again. Femtocells work similarly, except they use the same network technology to connect to phones as do the normal towers (ie. GSM, UMTS, or CDMA). They can also offer other abilities, such as detecting when a specific handset connects and issuing an email or SMS alert, similar to a proximity notification.
Sprint Nextel recently launched the first commercial Femtocell in the United States, a CDMA device built by Samsung and sold by Sprint under the Airave name.
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