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November
2009
Deployments
on three
continents
Since
our last newsletter, the femtocell industry has continued to grow at
pace. A number of major launches have taken place and there are now
commercial services live on three continents.
The June launch
of Vodafone's service in the UK was Europe's first and AT&T's
recent
rollout in the US adds a 3G focus to existing offerings from Sprint and
Verizon.
Meanwhile, in Asia, both Starhub and SoftBank have live femto
offerings.
Capacity
& user experience
While
the principal focus of these initial launches has been surrounding
additional network coverage, there is an increasing move towards
operator launches driven by capacity and enhancing user data
experience, which are increasingly becoming issues following on from
the huge success of 3G dongles and Smartphones.
With more
announcements expected in the following months, the market is
progressing well in line with our original expectations, despite the
challenging economic climate for new initiatives.
Also in this issue:
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Words from the chair
by Simon
Saunders, Chair,
Femto Forum
If anyone in the femtocell industry was hoping for a quiet summer they
will have been sorely disappointed.
Since our last newsletter in June
both Vodafone and AT&T commercially launched femtocells,
thereby
bringing the first European deployment and a clean sweep of femto
rollouts from the big three US mobile operators. Vodafone chose our
Femtocell World Summit in June to announce their launch of the Vodafone
Access Gateway in the UK on 1 July 2009.
In this issue we look at how these recent announcements leave the state
of global
deployments - now across three continents. With several further
announcements likely before the end of the year we feel thoroughly
vindicated in our 2007 prediction that 2009 would be the year that
femtocell technology would be ready for commercial launches, paving the
way for increasing volumes into 2010.
The Femto Forum itself
recently announced plans for the world's first comprehensive UMTS
femtocell plugfest which is a major milestone in the progress on
femtocell standardisation. In this issue, we examine this in further
detail including the incredibly short timescale in which it has been
achieved.
This summer we also held our inaugural
Femtocell Applications LIVE event which featured demonstrations of the
potential for femtocell-based mobile applications. This is one of the
most promising new dimensions to the femtocell business that few could
have predicted more than a year ago. It's also a hot bed of activity in
the forum and one you should expect to be hearing progress on in the
near future.
With femtocell deployments really gaining momentum
we're now in a great position to shed new light on perceived challenges
from some quarters around the femtocell business case and interference
management. Six months ago, when there were scant deployments this was
an area of theoretical discussion but we will look at what we've learnt
from the commercial deployments in this issue.
Finally, the
Femto Forum also recently added a raft of new members including Hitachi
which joins our growing list of consumer electronics companies. This
brings our total membership to 119, including 55 operators with over
1.4
billion mobile subscribers, further increasing our represenatation of
the femtocell industry across all technologies and geographies.
I hope you enjoy the newsletter and please feel free to provide
feedback on any issues we've covered by emailing us.
Look forward to seeing you at our Plenary
and Femtocells Americas in San Diego 18-20 November.
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