Mobilkom Austria gives mixed messages on femtocells
Mobilkom has announced that it wants to deploy femtocells commercially in Austria next year (and possibly in other European mobile subsidiaries of parent company Telekom Austria). However, the company’s top management provides little encouragement for vendors to respond enthusiastically to its RFP. Mobilkom CTO Johann Pichler told Unstrung he believes that femtocells are good for improving indoor coverage in “specific cases, but not generally,” and that the price of a femtocell needs to be “in the range of a WiFi router”. According to Total Telecom, Pichler is also sceptical about using femtocells to offload data traffic from the macro network, apparently contradicting conventional wisdom by suggesting that the problem will be solved by LTE.
Femto Forum announces Iu-h plugfest
The Femto Forum has announced the ‘1st Femto Forum UMTS Femtocell Plugfest’ which will take place in March next year at ETSI’s facilities in the South of France. There is widespread vendor support for the initiative, which aims to validate 3GPP’s Iu-h femtocell standard.
Current Analysis Research Director Peter Jarich commented, “a standard is meaningless until vendors and operators alike know that products are actually conforming to it, making interoperability testing a critical component of the femtocell market’s success.” But ABI’s Aditya Kaul believes that interoperability is a secondary consideration for operators, and that they are still more concerned with developing the business case.
Kevin Fitchard at Telephony Online looks forward to a time when femtocells are “standardized to a point customers can practically buy them off the shelf at a Best Buy or Radio Shack and expect them to work” (but his conjecture that femtocells are “a very European affair” is a rather strange one).
More 3G MicroCell news
Matt Ellenberger’s unboxing video for the 3G MicroCell shows how simple it is to set up and start using the device. He seems like a happy customer. Elsewhere, Mobiquizoid published a picture of the advert he received in the mail for AT&T’s femtocell in Atlanta. The pricing is subtly different from Charlotte, where the free calling plan costs $20. In Atlanta AT&T is trying two options – $15 for an individual free calling plan or $30 for a family plan.
Infonetics updates its FMC report
Infonetics Research has updated its FMC and Femtocell Equipment, Phones, and Subscribers report, finding “no evidence of the economic downturn having a major impact on the pace of FMC rollouts”. The research firm expects a dozen major operators to launch femtocell services in 2010, giving the market “a kick-start”.
Sales of FMC network element equipment and femtocell equipment are forecast to grow to $7.4 billion worldwide by 2013, slightly down on the $8 billion forecast in the original version of the report back in March. The number of femtocells sold is expected to increase five-fold from 2009 to 2010.
Smartphones are the real network hogs
Airvana has found that a typical smartphone generates eight times the network signalling load per MB of data transferred compared to a 3G connected laptop. This “load multiplier effect” is caused by the fact that smartphones are always on, moving between cell sites and continually querying the network. With iSuppli forecasting smartphone shipments to grow from nearly 200 million in 2009 to 450 million in 2013, this looks like a problem that’s going to get much worse. Mobile Europe and Rethink Wireless both spoke to Airvana’s Dave Nowicki, who suggested that offloading smartphone data traffic onto femtocells will help operators stay in control.
How to make femtocells faster than WiFi
Dean Bubley says a mobile operator could strike a deal with a broadband provider to “over-provision” capacity to its femtocell gateway, thereby releasing a constraint on the backhaul – but only for femtocell traffic. Dean suggests that “everybody wins” in this scenario. The user gets a blazing-fast femto connection, the mobile operator offloads more traffic and has a happier customer, and the broadband provider gets extra revenue for doing very little.
Picocells & femtocells can solve the spectrum crisis
Carl Weinschenk ponders the “looming spectrum crisis” discussed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at last week’s CTIA conference, and concludes that the cellular industry will not live up to expectations unless it meets the challenge of spectrum scarcity. “The smart money says that picocells and femtocells are the best bets for keeping the problem under control,” says Weinschenk.
Other news
- Total Telecom says momentum in the femtocell market is picking up.
- ComputerWorld: “if seamlessness matters, look for femtocells to really take off”.
- AIRCOM International explains why femtocells are important (part 2).
- Mark Hay ploughs a lone furrow with 2G femtocells.
- Will Franks expands on location validation for femtocells.
- Manish Singh tries to convince Telecom TV femto-sceptic Ian Scales.
- GigaOM says femtocells won’t last long – but you have to pay if you want to know why (don’t think I’ll bother).
- David Chambers considers WiFi and femtocell as options for traffic offload.
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: Airvana, AT&T 3G Microcell, Femto Forum, Femtocell, femtocells, Iu-h, Mobilkom, picocell, picocells, plugfest, Telekom Austria, WiFi
