Mobilkom announces femtocell trials
Austrian operator Mobilkom has said that it is piloting 35 residential and business femtocells from Huawei. The pilot project will run until the second quarter of 2009, with the final product offering to be launched in the first half of next year.
Tetsuzo Matsumoto, Chief Strategy Officer for SoftBank Mobile, was reported as saying this week that it will be 2-3 years before there is “a workable solution to the problem of cell-to-cell interference between femtocells and the macro network” as required to enable wide scale deployment. This seems to contradict SoftBank’s public position that they are satisfied with the interference management enabled by their current system, and are ready to deploy femtocells from January 2009. Sources close to the situation tell me that SoftBank has not changed it’s position, and it looks as though Matsumoto-san’s comments may have been mis-represented.
SK Telecom recently unveiled IB Cell, a business femtocell to be launched at the year end, while KT announced plans to start corporate service later this year and then home service next year.
3G is feeling the strain – femtocells to the rescue
Dean Bubley notes that mobile broadband is straining the 3G networks, and the cracks are starting to show. He says “alarm bells have started to ring with the rate at which network capacity is being apparently used up”, and that operators are starting to deploy their 3rd or even 4th carrier. According to Dean, this explains the “panicked interest in femtocells, 900MHz refarming, 2.6GHz auctions and various approaches to adding or splitting cells”. David Chambers looks at femtocells alongside other options here, and concludes that a balance of different approaches is needed.
Some comments on the Disruptive Wireless blog disagree with Dean’s assertion that “the current 3G networks have gone from empty to almost-full in just over a year”, but with a 10-fold increase in wireless traffic forecast (or is that 700-fold?), it’s surely just a matter of time anyway.
Femto hype cycle – down we go!
Despite numerous operator announcements recently, we’re starting to see some rather negative reporting on femtocells. Given that Gartner invented the “hype cycle”, it’s kind of appropriate to see their recent report announcing “The Femtocell Market is Unlikely to Take Off Before 2012″. I must admit to being somewhat mystified by many of the report’s conclusions – for example it doesn’t seem reasonable that 15 million subscribers will be served by only 2.5 million residential femtocells in 2012 (at an average of 6 subscribers per home).
The truly wonderful femtocell consumer proposition
Reading Fierce Wireless, I was surprised to find myself sounding rather downbeat about the femtocell consumer proposition. Let me assure you that this isn’t the case at all. In fact I think the consumer proposition is quickly going to become very compelling (look here). Today you share a signal from the macro network with everyone else in your neighbourhood; indoors this signal is weak – not good enough for high speed mobile data. With femtocells you can choose to have your own personal 3G cell. Why would anyone want that? Because it’s faster, clearer, and (depending on your operator) cheaper. If you’re not interested in that, you’re probably not in the target market. Yet. (And on top of that I can’t wait for femtozone services and connected home features…)
Huawei wants to build cheaper femtocells
According to James Chen, Huawei’s terminals director, the company’s femtocells are designed and owned by its networks business. “We have a very close relationship with the infrastructure business,” insisted Chen. “They develop the [femtocell] base station, we develop the routing… But the cost of making them is still too high.”
Here’s why you really don’t want a repeater
“I attached the antenna to the top of the metal mast that supports my weather station so that I could get as much height as possible. I then ran the coax down into the room below through an attic vent and plugged it into the base unit (you can add another 20 feet of coax if needed) – pretty easy.” Sure.
RadioFrame tops ABI’s picocell vendor matrix
I’m speechless. Lets just say well done to RadioFrame, and leave it at that.
AIRAVE
Some people are raving about AIRAVE, others are never satisfied.
Femto firms hire senior execs
- Airvana appoints industry veteran to VP of Engineering for its UMTS femtocell division.
- Tatara appoints Executive VP of Operations to accelerate the global market penetration of IP-based femtocell convergence and applications enablement (and that’s the abbreviated headline!).
- BitWave expands senior management team with VP Engineering.
More femtocell related news & articles…
- The Informer features femtocells again.
- Rob Bamforth says small networks win big prizes.
- Interview with Manish Singh from Continuous Computing.
- Hurdling the stumbling blocks of femtocell design.
- Are femtocells cost efficient?
- Ubiquisys and Rohde & Schwarz find femtocell test solution (was it lost?)
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: Airave, Airvana, BitWave, consumer proposition, Femtocell, femtocells, Huawei, hype cycle, KT, Mobilkom, RadioFrame, repeater, SK Telecom, Softbank, Tatara, Ubiquisys, WiBro
