home. “Adding multi-service capabilities when a subscriber is on a femtocell can be an incentive for consumers to adopt femtocells;” says Jalil, “however, femtocell [deployment] will primarily be driven by coverage requirements.”

That said, there is a little Swiss Army Knife movement in the industry. “I think putting a branded device in the home as well as creating a ‘home zone’ service offer is critical for operators going forward,” says Shaw. “Next-generation Home Zone 2.0 solutions based on WiFi or femtocells which use the public Internet to lower service delivery costs are key.”

“We are seeing a fair amount of interest in combining more and more functions into a single solution, [such as] a WiFi access point combined with a femtocell and a home router,” says Pitz. However, this is more driven by the desire of home network appliance vendors looking for an entry point by leveraging a “relationship” with femtocell connectivity than carriers looking to proactively extend their footprint into consumer’s gear. “The challenge right now is getting the price points down” for femtocells, as mentioned, to make economic sense for both consumers and carriers. “This is somewhat of a dichotomy…. Added services support makes products more attractive to consumers and generates more revenue [potentially] for the carrier–but that added functionality increases cost” when the industry is looking for femtocells to, above all, be a capacity-and-coverage enhancement that comes without cost. There is no denying, however, that multimedia services and multimode devices are accelerating the proliferation of con-nectivity-enabled devices in the consumer’s home, and this is only likely to increase. Samsung’s UBcell technology has “a data component and a means to control your TV and recorders,” observes Sipper. If femtocells do take off as an extension strategy, they will also be a more integral part of these multimode ecosystems, whether through carrier push or home network vendor pull. Could they then help carriers manage the multiple devices that their users are using to access services? For many in the industry, the answer is not really. Jalil sees a carrier’s femtocell strategy as being akin to any other access technology deployment. “The model of managing consumer’s personal devices is not widespread in other broadband data segments like cable and DSL with WiFi embedded gateways,” he says. ‘Femtocells don’t change anything significant.”

There is also the question of business strategy. “I’m not sure that carriers really want to manage the consumers’ products, nor do I believe that consumers want the carrier to have control over their equipment–until something breaks, that is,” believes Pitz, who acknowledges that this, however, is a challenge for the industry.

There may even be some more pragmatic reasons for this. “Operators are very protective of their licensed spectrum,” says Shaw. He doesn’t envision 3G spectrum as being the transmis-

sion medium for home networking, and indeed, “it’s hard to see it as anything other than mobile service…. Using femtocell-enabled spectrum for home network management, you’d need UMTS between your TV and your DSLAM,” which he believes is unlikely. That said, he doesn’t doubt that carriers (and the vendors who love them) won’t be grouping all these various access channels into, in his words, “a ‘god-box’ to the home…but the frequency [for home networking] will be WiFi. You won’t be able to control your TiVo with UMTS” although your mobile phone could talk to the rest of the network when it gets home to make that switch.

“As more and more device types get deployed, users have a bigger task managing them,” and most consumers do not want to be their “own IT department…. One could make a good argument for buying everything from one vendor if that vendor had a good management infrastructure.” All in all, Pitz, like many in the industry, doesn’t see femtocells as being a definitive step into the carrier-managed home network. “Clearly, having a device in the home opens a potential portal, but the femtocell in and of itself doesn’t seem to be the solution.”

Others, such as McFarland, disagree. “Operators are concerned about the proliferation of devices that they have to manage…. Integrating femtocells [into home-access solutions] makes management sense.”

Beyond management of devices, there is also some debate as to what the platform will be that these multitudinous devices will share that will allow them to switch seamlessly over from the mobile network to the home network. UMA is seen by many (though not all) to be the key to the device-centered future of femtocells; the technology obviously originally got its start as the enabling fabric for a WiFi-centric path from the home to the core. In FMC’s second life, where the mobile network reaches all the way to the home, says Sipper, “UMA had to latch onto femtocell technology, even though it was built to deliver over WiFi…. Vendors say they can do femto as well as leveraging hotspots.”

At the end of the day, whether femtos are being used as a means for mobile-centric carriers to appropriate the home network space or simply as an enabler of a more seamless mobile-to-fixed transi - tion experience, “the right strategy is flexibility. WiFi/cell dual - mode base stations allow operators to converge the core,” accord - ing to Sipper. “They need to have a migration strategy which wil l allow them to first capture the base, then build a gateway model , and then offer service over a pure IP layer.” The end game in fem - tos, it appears, is one commonly recognized by everyone in the VON-osphere. V

Ross O’Brien, our Asia/Pacific Editor, is a long-time telecom analyst , consultant, writer, and speaker who regularly appears on CNBC and CNN. He is headquartered in Hong Kong. You can reach him a t robrien@vonmag.com.