There was a lot of femto noise at CTIA this week in Las Vegas. With the exception of the ip.access / Sonus live demo, and one or two partnership announcements, most of the news was about CDMA femtocells…
Verizon to launch femtocells in 2008
“Our plans are to deploy femtocells in 2008,” said Verizon Wireless CTO, Tony Melone. He didn’t give many details, but he did say the company was gearing up for a full-fledged rollout – presumably in direct response to Sprint’s Airave femtocell and T-Mobile’s dual mode HotSpot@Home service. The story was also leaked earlier in the week.
Fierce Wireless commented that Verizon’s entry could “bring femtocell deployment to its tipping point in the US market … quickening the migration of customers from the wireline side of a large telco to the wireless side.”
Verizon is the big opportunity for the recently announced CDMA femtocell solutions from Motorola (with Airvana), Alcatel-Lucent (also with Airvana) and AirWalk – and of course Samsung, which has already deployed a 1X femtocell with Sprint. But Unstrung points out that CDMA femtocells might be a short-term solution as Verizon moves towards LTE.
ip.access & Sonus demo femtocell & picocell solutions at CTIA
Sonus and ip.access set up live calls through the Oyster 3G femtocell and the Sonus mobilEdge SIP/IP core network. In fact they called me at my desk in Cambridge from the booth in Las Vegas, and the call quality was great. Sonus also demonstrated mobilEdge working with ip.access nanoGSM picocells, including value added services for business customers such as “find-me-follow-me” and extension dialling.
Alcatel-Lucent Airvana partnership announced
“The CDMA femtocell solution envisioned by both companies combines Airvana’s radio access technology, including the femto access point and Femto Network Gateway services provided by the Universal Access Gateway (UAG), together with Alcatel-Lucent’s IMS core supporting CDMA-SIP convergence.” So it’s the Airvana RAN with the ALU core network.
Patricia Russo, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, mentioned femtocells in her CTIA interview with RCR Wireless.
More on the Motorola / Airvana CDMA femtocell solution
The solution will use Motorola’s NBBS device management system, but it’s not clearly stated whether the core network integration is via Airvana’s Universal Access Gateway or a Motorola Femto Network Gateway.
Daniel Moloney, executive VP of Motorola and president of the company’s Home & Networks Mobility business, mentioned femtocells in his CTIA interview with RCR Wireless.
AirWalk CEO talks up the CDMA femto opportunity
Sensationally, Serge Pequeux says that the Sprint Airave trial has been shut down and that AirWalk is well positioned to take over the business from Samsung. He also suggests CDMA femtocells will retail to consumers at a subsidised price of $200 per femtocell, and that Sprint and operators in Japan will pay as much as $400 per unit!
CTIA WIRELESS 2008 E-Tech Award winners announced
Samsung’s UbiCell won the Network Infrastructure – In-Building / Local Area Network Solution category in CTIA’s E-Tech awards.
More mainstream femto coverage from CTIA
There were articles on CNN Money and USA Today. End user responses on the USA Today site were not too encouraging – a typical example being “Why would I want to pay another $15/month when I’m already paying a fee for unlimited calling? The carrier’s network should be good enough that I don’t need this box. If not, I’ll switch to one that is.”
RadioFrame introduces OmniCell@Home and OmniCell@Work
The new femtocells will initially include 2G, expanding to a combined 2G/3G access point. It’s not easy to spot the difference between this and RFN’s CTIA announcement last year.
Orange France to deploy RadioFrame picocell
I think we heard this before as well – back in January. According to the new announcement, this is “expected to be the first mobile solution to be widely deployed specifically for enhanced coverage to smaller remote and inaccessible business locations in Europe”. OK, marketing spin is fair enough, but this is like announcing that mankind is about to make a first attempt to land on the moon. Surely they can’t be unaware that many European operators have been deploying picocells for enterprise coverage for years?
Rethink Research: Base Station Technology Forecast 2008 – 2012
Picocells and femtocells will account for almost 25% of operators spend on base station technology by the end of 2012.
New Unstrung report on femtocells in the US
Unstrung concludes that the main barrier to early deployments this year is cost. But it says that a deep subsidy on femtocells makes sense when it is cheaper than replacing customers and cheaper than replacing infrastructure.
More on mobile broadband driving the need for femtocells
Mobile broadband (i.e. laptops using HSDPA) is exploding. There are now more than 32 million connections worldwide, compared to 3 million a year ago. For operators this causes big concerns about capacity, both in mobile networks and backhaul, according to Informa’s Mark Newman. As the subscriber numbers increase, operators will have to upgrade networks, or users will see performance decrease and start to complain. This will drive demand for femtocells: “Sending data via base stations is a poor way of using capacity, if a majority of users are sitting at home,” said Newman.
O2’s Mike Short on femto – er, sorry – picocells
Asked by Fierce Wireless to comment on femtocells, O2 VP R&D Mike Short said “Some enterprise customers will say ‘Alright, we’ll buy a thousand cell phones from you, if you improve the coverage in our building.’ So along with selling the handsets and providing the connectivity, you have to improve the coverage as part of that.” That’s what picocells are used for all the time.
Lots of news from Tatara…
- Product announcement of a CDMA-1xRTT Convergence Server (i.e. a SIP/IMS service interworking application server for the delivery of CDMA 1xRTT services to SIP-based end points over a VoIP or IMS infrastructure). No EV-DO?
- Tatara + Airwalk partnership for SIP based network integration of CDMA femtocells
- Tatara + Netgear partnership for SIP based n/w integration of WCDMA femtocells
In-flight GSM update
- AeroMobile & OnAir talk about picocells and their customers
- AeroMobile works with Panasonic to deploy in-flight GSM: the companies will take advantage of Panasonic’s market leading position in the supply of in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems to deliver the state-of-the-art eXPhone aircraft cellular communications solution. Under the relationship, AeroMobile will supply its aircraft ‘pico cell’ technology to Panasonic, which will also use existing Panasonic units to complete the Panasonic eXPhone system.
Comcast, BitTorrent decide to play nice together
That potentially bodes well for future cooperation between femtocell operators and broadband providers.
And finally…
Thanks to Dean Bubley, James Middleton and Peter Judge for their blog responses to our “attocells” April Fool.
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: AeroMobile, Airvana, Airwalk, Alcatel-Lucent, CTIA, Femtocell, femtocells, ip.access, Motorola, OnAir, Orange, RadioFrame, Sonus, Tatara, Verizon
