Femtocell is the new Klondike

Rating: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is

By Annie Turner

Interesting piece in BusinessWeek today. It reports T-Mobile USA’s claim that the main reason people swap mobile service supplier is to get better mobile coverage within their homes, where between 27% to 41% of all mobile minutes are accounted for.

The article also points out that the rush to perfect a commercial femto cell offering is underway. In February, Motorola bought start-up Netopia while on 20 July, Google was part of a group of investors that handed over USD 20m investment in British femto cell start-up Ubiquisys.

This was hard on the heel of French conglomerate Thomson, the world’s largest maker of DSL modems, striking a deal with Nokia Siemens Networks to develop the technology. While on 2 July, Netgear, which makes Wi-Fi routers, co-founded the Femto Forum, promote femto cell standards and use. Other forum members include Airvana, ip.access, picoChip, RadioFrame Networks, Tatara Systems and Ubiquisys.

What’s generated all this frantic activity? Predictions such as that made by ABI Research that by 2012, there will be more than 150 million people using femto cell on 70 million access points worldwide. Plus of course the hardcore telco equipment makers are desperate to be central to the action (they’ve had some very tough years since 2001), while the likes of Google are eyeing a way of cutting the established telecoms providers out of the loop.

This blog is also a curious juxtaposition with the one below on the demise of BT Movio (the nascent mobile TV service) because if femto cells take off as quickly as predicted and are able to provide enough bandwidth, people will use their mobile phones for much, much more than making calls in the house. Already there are reports of people watching TV on the mobile phones as well as sort of watching the boring old big box in the corner at the same time.

On the other hand, I’ve been writing about telecoms almost since the Ark grounded and heard the hype around ISDN and Bluetooth, among, many, many other communications technologies that were going to change the world. Don’t hold your breath. If anything happens at all, it takes generally takes much longer than predicted by experts.

Related News:

1. Motorola signs up European operator for femto cell trial
2. T-Mobile Venture Fund invests in Ubiquisys
3. Motorola develop mobile movie service
4. HSL Announce Addition of 3G to 2.75G Femtocell
5. HSL’s 2.75G (GSM/GPRS/EDGE) Femtocell in Final Phase of Development - Pricing, Managed Services and Availability Announced