Femtocell market update for week of 6 Apr 2009

Femtocell standard published
The Femto Forum, 3GPP and the Broadband Forum have announced that the world’s first femtocell standard has been officially published by 3GPP.  The new Iu-h standard covers network architecture, radio and interference aspects, provisioning and security, and forms part of 3GPP’s Release 8 specification.  Femtocell management and provisioning are standardised via extensions to [...]

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 12 Jan 2009

Ubiquisys and Percello announce partnership
Ubiquisys and Percello have announced that they will be integrating Percello’s PRC6000 chip into Ubiquisys’ ZoneGate femtocell.  As an investor in both companies, T-Venture might have had a hand in the matchmaking.
So is Ubiquisys ditching picoChip in favour of Percello?  Well, not exactly.  According to Ubi’s founder and CTO Will Franks, [...]

Market update for week of 31 Mar 2008

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, [...]

Market update for week of 24 Mar 2008

Forbes says femtocells will cause mobile services price collapse
Hidden in this otherwise reasonably good write-up is the somewhat bizarre claim that “…for carriers, femtocells are as scary a threat as free Wi-Fi”.
Apparently, because they “create a flood of additional capacity at very small cost” they could cause an industrywide price collapse.
Huh?
The Guardian on femtocells
“What [...]

Market update for week of 17 Mar 2008

Ericsson maintains its resistance to 3G femtocells
This time Ericsson is saying that the chips are too expensive, so they won’t build a 3G femtocell before 2009. But analysts believe the real reason for Ericsson’s resistance is the fact that femtocells threaten the vendor’s core macro cellular infrastructure business. “Ericsson welcomes the femtocell [...]

Market update for week of 10 Mar 2008

Softbank to launch femtocells in October
Softbank’s femtocell launch is being planned for October. Interestingly, they have been using in-home repeaters to test the concept, which suggests a basic coverage proposition – repeaters don’t provide any of the other, more interesting benefits that femtocells offer (private cell capacity for the home, homezone discounts, femtozone services…).
Softbank [...]