vfioelemnttobysRoss O’Brien

Femtocells make a lot of sense, both as an access tool to increase coverage and as a
leverage point to get into the home–the converged carrier’s last battlefield.

For many femtocell industry participants, 2008 will be some- what of a “block and tackle” year. A handful of carriers–Sprint most noticeably among them to date–are engaging in commercial adoption of femtocell technology, either to enhance coverage or capacity as the battle for telephony customers continues to be waged on the final frontier: the residence. Increasingly, industry participants think that 2008 is “the year” that serious carrier trials and deployments have to take place to carry forward momentum in the years ahead.

“We are seeing significant increases in the interest from equipment vendors, and there are several projects under way to build femtocells,” says Rick Pitz, Senior Product Manager and Business Development Manager at Certicom ( www.certicom.com), an encryption and security tools developer that also builds UMA device software. “We take this to mean that the vendors are seeing enough interest from the carriers to warrant the investment in new developments…which is usually a sign that the market is getting ready to move.”

Rehan Jalil, President and CEO of WiChorus (www.wichorus. com), a developer of intelligent gateways for WiMAX and other mobility platforms, agrees. “There is clear evidence that there is momentum behind femtocells, especially on the 3G side in the early part of 2008…. WiMAX femtocells will probably get more traction in the later part of 2008 or in 2009.”

Femtos give a carrier the ability to service customers in their own home networks in a way that the “macro network” does not, in the opinion of Steve Shaw, Associate Vice President of Marketing at Kineto Wireless ( www.kineto.com). “Femtos let you target services for the mobile phone user at home…. They make it easy for consumers to use the mobile device [at home] in ways that allow them to do other things.” Being in a “femto zone” at home, he believes, allows for mobile users to access “personal data services, social networking, and instant messaging.”

Some see inevitability; others see urgency. “There has been a lot of R&D investment, but the proof is in the pudding–real-world trials. It is critical that we see deployment in 2008,” says Michael McFarland, Senior Product Manager, CDMA, for Airvana (www.

airvana.com). He sees the pressing need to get things rolling because they have to. The home is the last frontier for traditional mobile carriers, which need not only better coverage in residential markets. Some would argue that need for network coverage alone has prompted Sprint’s femto foray, but this isn’t exactly the point that a carrier wants to put across in marketing literature. As one industry pundit wisecracked, “You can’t get subscribers to pay because your coverage sucks.”

But more deployments also mean more scale, and scale means cheaper femtos, and with that, a fair chance at getting to the estimated 30 million units that some industry analysts predict will be in service by 2012. “To get WiFi router price points [under US$100] out of ‘collapsed’ femtocell base stations, they need to be sold in the volumes, and that’s going to take several generations,” notes McFarland, adding that for WiFi routers to get to their current costs, they needed roughly a half dozen generations. In other words, if the mobile industry doesn’t start deploying femtocells now, it will never get to the point where femtocells will make economic sense for carriers or the customers they are trying to reach.

But like many things in the “next-generation” industry, there is increasing evidence that this traction may be accelerated if femtocell technology can be deployed in multimedia or multi-service contexts. Using femtocells to provide support for data-hungry applications like IPTV backhaul, for instance, is seen by some as an additional “hook” into the triple/quadruple/multi-play home. “Femtocells as a cell tower replacement is not enough–there need to be additional services,” opines Aaron Sipper, Director of Product Marketing, NextPoint Networks ( www.nextpoint.com).

There is some debate as to whether femtocells themselves would serve as the carriage point for a lot of that traffic although most think that it will not be; rather, the femtocell will be combined with other technology to ensure that wireless traffic from the “outside world” gets routed onto a home network in the most cost- and spectrum-efficient way–but that the mobile device remains the core navigational tool for the consumer even when at