Considering that the last time Sprint's Airave was even relevant was when a smattering of folks bought one in Denver and Indianapolis, like, last September, here's a quick refresher on what this thing does. Similar to T-Mobile @home, this box plugs into one's broadband connection and essentially acts as a mini cell tower within your house, which will certainly make folks in a fringe zone with no option for Roam Only (feel our pain, Instinct owners?) quite happy. For whatever reason, the carrier has dilly-dallied around with this thing forever, and even if whispers prove true and it launches on July 15th for $99 (on top of a monthly fee for unlimited minutes, we hear), we have to wonder if anyone will even bite. Two more shots in the read link.

Truth be told, Fixed Mobile Convergence still isn't talked about much (comparatively speaking) 'round these parts. Yeah, we've seen a few FMC routers scattered about, but Vodafone's taking a stand by rolling out its Station in Italy. The box, which was developed in cooperation with Huawei, is an integrated switch / router with ADSL2+, WiFi, UMTS / HSPA (via a removable USB key) and four Ethernet ports. Essentially, it's designed to combine voice with fixed and mobile broadband services, and it enables users to make calls on their handset through a fixed line connection when they're kicking back at home. We're also hearing that the device will eventually make its way to other Vodafone markets, but there's been no word yet on future rollout dates.

[Via GigaOM]

Yep, we're mandating that this one be filed in the rumor folder for now, but according to a report from ThinkPanmure, AT&T Mobility is planning to move up to 7 million femtocells acquired from UK-based ip.access. As the story goes, AT&T inked a contract with the aforesaid firm for up to half a billion dollars in femtocells over five years, and it's supposedly aiming to sell each to end users for "as little as $100." As expected, spokespeople for AT&T and ip.access weren't around / didn't care to comment on the matter, but a dame from the former did admit that it was "examining the potential benefits of femtocells through lab tests and planned to conduct a trial later this year." Of course, AT&T wouldn't be the first US carrier to offer the boxes, but it's not like Sprint's $49.99 Airave set any sales records or anything when it launched late last year.

We're not going to say that femtocell technology is "all the rage" right now, but we will admit that we're seeing some real players get into the game. If you've been wondering when these unicorn-like devices were going to start making their way into the real world, you can finally get some answers. With Mobile World Congress coming up soon, a number of new products and services centered around the signal-proliferating technology are being announced, including a handful of entries from Netgear and collaborators, as well as new products from Motorola. Check the press releases below and learn all about it. Remember, knowing is half the battle.

Read - NETGEAR and Kineto Wireless To Showcase 3G Femto Home Access Solution at Mobile World Congress
Read - NETGEAR and Nokia Siemens Networks Collaborate on 3G Femto Home Access Solution
Read - NEC and NETGEAR Team to Develop an Integrated 3G Access Point for Femtocell Solution
Read - Motorola Announces Family of Femtocell Solutions

Remember that cool Ubicell in-home booster we played with back at CTIA? Sprint's finally starting to roll out the device this week as the "Airave" in "select areas" of Denver and Indianapolis this week. Overall, the concept is very similar to T-Mobile's @Home service -- it connects through your ISP, racks up a monthly fee ($15 in this case, $30 for families), boosts your signal and doesn't deduct plan minutes -- but with the Airave, CDMA signals are served up instead of @Home's WiFi, which means any Sprint handset should work like a champ. The box itself runs $49.99, not a bad entry fee considering the healthy list of benefits it affords. Look for it in the rest of Denver and Indy along with Nashville later this year followed by a nationwide rollout in 2008.

It wouldn't be too surprising to see a networking firm and a developer of intelligent 3G femtocell access points work in harmony to crank out a dazzling all-in-one contraption, and it looks like Netgear and Ubiquisys have done just that. Aiming to simultaneously enable mobile operators to provide enhanced cellular coverage in the home and allow consumers to access and control a range of home networking services via standard 3G handsets, the two have joined forces to stuff Ubiquisys' ZoneGate into future Netgear WAPs. The currently unnamed solution will reportedly pack an integrated DSL modem, WiFi, VoIP, and 3G femtocell technology into a single box, and while it's not scheduled to go commercial until early next year at best, operator testing should go live by Q4 of 2007.