KTF, Korea’s second largest mobile operator, has announced that it is collaborating with Huawei on the development of femtocells (presumably WCDMA).
This article in French says that SFR is still experimenting with femtocells, and shows a picture of an SFR branded femtocell (Ubiquisys flavour) plugged into the Neufbox, Neuf / SFR’s residential gateway offering 70 TV channels, free calls to fixed line phones in 70 countries, and many additional services (thanks to our resident satisfied Neufbox owner, Thierry Samama, for these details).
Will 80% of web users choose mobile broadband over fixed by 2013?
Ericsson says it expects 80% of Internet subscribers will connect via mobile broadband instead of fixed by 2013, using LTE technology to deliver a high speed data experience. Some of the arguments look sensible (such as the ability to reach rural areas more cost effectively than with fibre), but overall the analysis seems overly optimistic. For a start, the gap between fixed and mobile broadband speeds seems to be widening, not narrowing. And then there’s the fact that LTE improves peak data rates dramatically, but has a much less significant effect on overall data throughput in a cell. In other words, LTE won’t solve the capacity crunch. This is one reason for the excitement about using femtocells to build out LTE networks “from the indoors out“, thereby adding lots of extra capacity. “Far from hastening their demise, this suggests that the importance of fixed broadband connections will actually increase, because they are needed to make the femtocells work.
picoChip promotes the “LTE metro femto”
picoChip CTO Doug Pulley might have expected to spark some controversy at the LTE World Summit in London this week, with his assertion that “the macrocell is dead!” But, apparently, everyone agreed with him. China Mobile and T-Mobile International backed his proposal that femtocells and picocells will be essential, not only for indoor coverage but outdoors as well, to ensure the network has sufficient capacity. picoChip believes femtocells will be fundamental to LTE for both residential and public hotspot, or “metro femto” deployments. The company used the Summit to reveal further details of its LTE basestation reference designs – the PC8618 picocell and PC8608 femtocell platforms, designed in collaboration with mimoOn and ASTRI and targeted to run on picoChip’s PC203 processor. The target price for LTE femtocells in 2011 is $70.
David Chambers thinks this LTE metro femto idea is more convincing than residential deployments (where backhaul constraints will mean that LTE femtocells will have no advantage over their 3G counterparts). But for outdoor deployments, “there’s no doubt that smaller cells combined with the higher performance of LTE and the self-managing/optimising techniques developed for femtocells can deliver a massive amount of capacity in targeted areas,” he notes.
Mobile data revenues still growing despite the economic downturn
Chetan Sharma has released their latest analysis of the wireless data market. Despite the economic climate, US mobile data revenues will come close to hitting their original estimate of $34 billion. Revenues grew 37.5% from Q307 to Q308 (which sounds good, although it’s far below the growth rates for the data traffic itself). “The networks…are not able to handle the load during peak times in certain cities thus forcing carriers to look for alternate strategies to satisfy the demand for broadband – metered billing, UMA, Femtocells, Hotspot buys, WiMAX, LTE, and others,” says the report. Interestingly, Chetan Sharma think that subscribers will go for package deals and family plans in order to save money, which makes femtocells a potentially attractive option.
WiFi world spooked by femtocells?
In this article, Peter Thornycroft (a technologist with Aruba Networks) reviews femtocells from a rather WiFi-biased perspective. Not that I blame him, and not that I’m unbiased myself, of course. Anyway, it looks as though the WiFi world considers femtocells a serious enough threat that it’s worth putting out some anti-femto propaganda.
Continuous Computing’s Todd Mersch asks “what is keeping the home base station from hitting operators’ storefronts this holiday season?”, and concludes that femtocells are, in fact, making progress at an impressive rate compared to the average new technology introduction.
Pundits still querying the femtocell business case
Paul Lambert, Editor of Global Mobile, says “even a cursory analysis shows that the whole femtocell project - at the moment – is woolly from start to finish”. He then trots out the usual business case objections, asking “why should [operators] spend significant amounts of money subsidizing femtocells when they’ve already invested heavily in building-out macro networks?” Well basically, Paul, they are going to have to spend a lot more on their macro networks in future to meet increasing demands for mobile data, and femtocells represent a cheaper and quicker alternative. At the same time it’s getting harder and harder to deploy macro network infrastructure, as this everyday story of a neighbourhood objecting to the rapid spread of cellphone antennas shows.
Nextivity to launch “smart repeater” at Mobile World Congress
Nextivity CEO Werner Sievers says 40% of mobile subscribers report problems with indoor signals (that’s the highest figure I’ve heard!), and that he expects to sell 3.5 million repeaters over the next 3 years. Nextivity claims its repeaters can more than triple data transmission rates, and that they are being tested by 24 European mobile network operators.
More femto news and articles…
- Rethink says it’s SoftBank vs. AT&T in the race to use femtocells to expand mobile broadband services and capacity.
- David Chambers proposes mobile broadband tariffs designed to encourage data offload onto femtocells.
- Computer World answers “18 burning questions about femtocells” (but if you’re reading this you’ll know the answers already).
- Femtocells get ready to invade.Airvana launches the Femto Hub website (which I’ve found quite useful).
- Hay Systems unveils 2.75G femtocell (following previous announcements that they were going to do it and that they had almost finished doing it).
- More reports that Sprint’s Airave works well, and a nice picture of one in a real home.
- Femtocells feature in this week’s Carnival of the Mobilists.
- This blogger seems rather worked up about the potential for third parties to snoop on your femtocell calls.
- Benoît Debains, CEO of OnAir explains how in-flight communication services operate onboard aircraft.
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: Airvana, Aruba Networks, ASTRI, AT&T, Chetan Sharma, Continuous Computing, Ericsson, Femtocell, femtocells, Huawei, KTF, LTE, metro femto, momoOn, nextivity, OnAir, picoChip, SFR, Softbank, Ubiquisys, WiFi
