Femtocell market update for week of 31 August 2009

Vodafone publishes indoor 3G coverage maps
Vodafone has published new 3G coverage maps for the UK, for the first time showing both indoor and outdoor coverage.  From a glance at the maps it’s obvious that indoor coverage is very poor in many areas.  (In practice the situation may be even worse than the maps show – [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 9 Feb 2009

Femto Forum study finds positive femto business cases – lots of them!
We’ve seen a lot of negative opinion bandied about on the subject of the femtocell business case, and a number of partial reposts.  But a new study from Signals Research Group, commissioned by the Femto Forum, aims to put the issue to bed once [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 22 September 2008

Japan’s SoftBank getting ready to launch 3G femtocells
The big announcement at the “Femtocells Asia 2008″ conference was SoftBank’s plan to launch 10,000 femtocells in Japan from January 2009, which may turn out to be the first commercial 3G femtocell deployment anywhere in the world.  SoftBank CTO, Junichi Miyakawa, presented details of the technical solution from [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 1 September 2008

DoCoMo updates its femtocell offering
Japanese giant NTT DoCoMo said it is planning to use a new version of Mitsubishi’s femtocell for its “Home Area” service.  The new femto supports HSPA with 14.4 Mbps downlink speeds and 5.7 Mbps uplink.  DoCoMo’s original Mitsubishi femtocell has been in use since the autumn of 2007, although without much [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 18 August 2008

ip.access ranks top specialist femto vendor in operator perception survey
More details have been published from Heavy reading’s recent operator perception survey. The operators surveyed ranked their perceptions of femtocell equipment suppliers. Alcatel-Lucent got top marks among the large vendors, while ip.access was the highest ranked among the smaller femto vendors.
Business Week says Airave [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 11 August 2008

Airave  reviews mostly positive
More reviews of the Sprint Airave appeared this week, most being very positive on the technology but not so pleased with the pricing. Here’s a selection of quotes…
Engadget says…

“Here’s what it all boils down to – does this unit really make a noticeable improvement in call quality and signal strength? In [...]

Femtocell market update for week of 9 June 2008

Will SFR be first with femtocells in Europe?
“Sources” said this week that SFR will put femtocells on sale in France before the end the year.  One factor driving SFR is Orange’s “Unik” dual-mode FMC service, which offers a similar customer proposition to femtocells albeit with different technology.  Another is SFR’s acquisition of Neuf Cegetel, France’s [...]