Femtocell market update for week of 14 September 2009

A ‘growing divide’ on 4G femtocells?
Fierce Wireless reports “a growing divide between those who believe femtocells and picocells are necessary in 4G coverage and those that don’t”.
In the Pro camp we find Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow, who used his talk at this week’s 4G World conference to urge network equipment vendors to focus on picocells, [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 24 August 2009

Wall Street Journal covers femtocells
A WSJ article this week (full text here) points out that “carriers are reluctant to talk about coverage problems…making femtocells a tough product to market to consumers”.  However, Kevin Packingham, senior VP of product development for Sprint, is quoted as saying “advertising will ramp up with next-generation femtocells since it [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 15 June 2009

First Iu-h demo
picoChip, Starent and Continuous Computing are set to show the world’s first demonstration of the new 3GPP Iu-h standard.  picoChip is supplying the femtocell silicon and PHY software for the Access Point, Continuous Computing is supplying the femto software stacks for the AP and Starent is supplying the femto gateway.  The demo will [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 30 Mar 2009

Cellcom picks Starent & AirWalk for CDMA femtocell deployment
Cellcom is planning to roll out CDMA femtocells to its enterprise customers in Wisconsin.  Unlike Sprint and Verizon, both of whom use Samsung’s femtocell solution, Cellcom will use AirWalk’s recently announced EdgePoint PRO femtocell access point (which supports up to 28 simultaneous users) and Starent’s XT30 Femto [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 1 December 2008

Good news on femtocell interference
The Femto Forum has published the results of an extensive radio study, concluding that interference is not a barrier to wide scale femtocell deployment even when the femtocells occupy the same radio channel as the macro network.  Many Femto Forum member companies contributed to the study, [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 24 November 2008

Singapore’s StarHub launches world’s first commercial 3G femtocell service
(Website ¦ FAQ)
StarHub’s ‘Home Zone’ femtocell is currently limited to the first 200 subscribers, so it’s perhaps more of a market trial than a full commercial launch.  It’s similar in principle to Sprint’s trial of the AIRAVE, which was initially limited to a couple [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 17 November 2008

KTF working on femtocells
KTF, Korea’s second largest mobile operator, has announced that it is collaborating with Huawei on the development of femtocells (presumably WCDMA).
Pictures of SFR’s femtocell
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 [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 15 September 2008

Users say how Sprint’s Airave could be improved
Airave users commenting on the Engadget site say that Sprint should remove the monthly fee (e.g. “I don’t mind buying the box and maybe even a one time fee for setup, but monthly recurring charges to fix bad signal issues? Hmmm… Nope.”  Others, not understanding the legal constraints, [...]

Market update for week of 12 May

Was Airave Sprint’s second choice?
This article makes the interesting assertion that Sprint originally planned to roll out a WiFi dual mode service, but switched to femtocells after the launch of HotSpot@Home by T-Mobile. The author argues that femto was therefore Sprint’s second choice, but it looks to me as though the headline should read [...]

Market update for week of 4 Feb 2008

No time for analysis this week, with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona coming up. Here are the headlines…
ip.access & Mavenir partner for femtozone services
“Together with Mavenir Systems, we are creating a platform for operators to offer a wide range of new mobile phone services for the home. With femtozone services, operators can [...]