Seeking LTE expert to insert small cells into BT customers' places

BT is recruiting an expert on 4G small cells. What are they up to?

The job ad reads:

BT is seeking a talented principal engineer who can drive the technical specification and design of LTE small cell products for our consumer Customer Premises Equipment. You will be implementing BT’s mobility strategy alongside the team of engineers responsible for delivering BT’s Home Hub and our large portfolio of Home Connectivity products.

The interesting bits here are “LTE” and “consumer”. This is the service which BT has been making noises about ever since it bought its 2.6GHz spectrum for £186m.

If BT is looking to put small cells – what used to be called micro cells, picocells and femtocells - into consumers’ homes, it will need to ensure they have the (fibre) bandwidth to provide the backhaul. Yet BT does already have a lot of fibre customers on the 76Mbps Infinity plan, and a lucky few with 300Mb/s FTTP connections.

BT could conceivably mirror what it has done with FON so that BT customers with fast broadband – aided by the person who gets the above job – could add a base station to the BT infrastructure.

This is different to the OnePhone project announced recently as that uses two GSM guard bands. ®