Femtocell market update for week of 4 May 2009

Ericsson holds out on 3G femtocells
Ericsson SVP and head of business unit networks Johan Wibergh said this week, “we still don’t understand the business case for 3G femtocells”.  Speaking after a Q&A session at Ericsson’s capital market day event, he told Unstrung that WiFi is the answer to the indoor data problem, and that Ericsson [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 2 Mar 2009

Femtocells won’t feature in Verizon’s initial LTE launch
There has been lots of talk about rolling out LTE networks “from the indoors out”.  Verizon CTO Dick Lynch said last December that Verizon would introduce LTE femtocells shortly after rolling out its LTE network, but this week Verizon confirmed that femtocells are not part of the LTE [...]

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 29 September 2008

Maxis plans femtocell trial
Maxis, Malaysia’s leading mobile operator, plans to trial femtocells by year end.  Head of Radio Technologies, Denis Seek Kwai Yin, told the Femtocells Asia 2008 conference in Kuala Lumpur that Maxis is interested in using femtocells to implement home zone tariffs and location tracking services such as intruder alert.
Ericsson & Tatara collaborate [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 8 September 2008

Softbank femtocell deployment
Unstrung reports that Softbank Mobile in Japan has installed 20,000 femtocells from NEC / Ubiquisys, and that it is also checking out equipment from Huawei.  But there are, apparently, still some technical and regulatory issues standing in the way of mass market deployment.
Orange goes for 3G UMA
Orange is upgrading its “Unik” dual mode [...]

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 [...]

Market update for week of 18 Feb 2008

Further insights from O2
O2’s Head of Core Network Innovation, John Carvalho gave further insights this week into the operator’s femtocell plans. Interestingly, Carvalho sees femtocell price points stabilising at £50-80, but not before 2009 and not until mass deployments are underway. This is perhaps more realistic than Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin’s comments last [...]

Market update for week of 17 December 2007

RadioFrame partners with NSN
You may remember that Nokia Siemens Networks is promoting a femtocell architecture based on an Iu interface from the Access Point to a gateway connecting to the core network. Rather than building its own Access Point, NSN is encouraging other vendors to build APs for certification against its universal gateway. [...]

Market update for week of 10 December 2007

Another femtocell market forecast
Infonetics Research predicts the femtocell market will reach $630M in 2010. This is less than the most recent ABI Research prediction, but it’s still a big number. IDATE was recently even more aggressive than ABI, predicting 18 million UMTS femtocell shipments in 2011 (compared to ABI’s 13 million). Here’s [...]