ight at the end of a dark tunnel of technology-driven social and economic inequality, the potential dawn of a new age of engineering-based personalised mass enlightenment, enlightenment for the many not the few. 12.11.3 Enabling Wireless Technologies - Femtocells And then I noticed that what I should really have been talking about in this chapter was mobile phone network topologies, but then this prompted me to look at what we had covered in Chapter 12 of 3 G Handset and Network Design only to discover that not only had this topic already been fully addressed but also very little had changed in the intervening eight-year period. Base stations had become smaller, smart antennas had become a bit smarter, integration with WiFi networks had progressed a bit but not a lot. For at least the last five of those eight years femtocells have been promoted as the new panacea. These devices never made much sense from a user-experience perspective. A fem- tocell in your home promised access speeds rather lower than the WiFi already installed that you now could not use as it was providing the backhaul for your new femtocell. The femtocell was available with only one operator providing the service SO if other members of the family had service contacts with other operators, additional femtocells were needed that would then produce adjacent channel interference with other femtocells. Meanwhile, WiFi access points became cheaper and faster. And this is probably quite a good though slightly negative point to end this chapter. Inno- vations only become widely adopted if they deliver added value to all players in the value chain. In the case of femtocells, they solve an operator problem (poor indoor coverage from outdoor cells) but as far as the user is concerned, why should that involve fixing a problem that is clearly the responsibility of the operator who already takes a large monthly fee but now appears to be expecting the consumer to provide free backhaul as well. This brings us to our next chapter. Wireless Core Network Hardware