3G Femto or 802.11g WiFi: Which Is the Best Indoor Data Solution Today?

In this paper HSPA Release 6 femto and IEEE 802.11g WiFi indoor data solutions are investigated from an end user perspective. Femto and WiFi access points are deployed at typical locations in an urban environment and end user performance is measured. Three key performance indicators (KPI) were defined - downlink and uplink user data rates, latency and mobile power consumption. These three KPIs are of high importance when choosing an indoor data solution. Our measurements show that the downlink and uplink data rates of the WiFi solution are significantly higher than femto data rates. Similarly, latency results show that WiFi outperforms the femto solution. Especially, the radio resource control (RRC) connection set-up time increases the latency for the femto. In terms of idle power consumption the best results are obtained when the mobile camps on the femto. Whereas, WiFi performs best in all active mode power consumption measurements. Based on our KPIs, the preferred indoor data solution today is WiFi. The deciding factor is the combined latency and power performance of the WiFi, where WiFi outperforms the femto.