Submitted by Adam Reeves, NetScout Product Marketing Manager
I watched a webinar on femtocells presented by the Yankee Group back in June, and just came across my notes.
Yankee and Research Fellow Roberta Wiggins are predicting, in what she described as “cautious” forecast that femtocells will have 17.8M shipments worldwide in 2012 bringing the installed base of users to 23.9M or about 5.3% penetration of the global broadband market. Coupling this with dual-mode phones over wi-fi like that being provided by T-Mobile and the carriers could be running significant IP traffic (in addition to that enabled by the iPhone - See blog entry "Is the 3G iPhone still what's hot?") onto their networks. A big if in this is the assumption that the cost of CPE drops from its current price (above $200/instance) to below $50. She seems to think that initial deployments competing and complimenting wi-fi hotspots may have the capacity to drive volumes and reduce this cost – I’m excited about the technology, so let’s assume she’s right.
Femto technology has the potential to do a several things. First, it could drive huge numbers of users from 2G to 3G technology (where Femtos will likely operate) as users look to take advantage of the in-house/building call quality advantages of femtos (hence my excitement as a SOHO employee with marginal call quality on my mobile phone). This has the potential to drive greater mobile-IP traffic as users then continue to take advantage of that 3G technology away from their in-house/building femtocell. At the same time, assuming that the mobile carriers (and potentially the MSOs who are well suited for this model) use this as an entrée into the home broadband network, they could drive massive amounts of new mobile-centric IP data. Furthermore, femto technology has the opportunity to enable multiple new applications and incremental revenue sources for carriers. For instance, location-based services that can notify when a user enters the house or synchronization applications between phones (think music downloads and photos – but potentially even business-related documents) and home computers
Somewhere between the large numbers of new users, potentially massive growth in traffic, and new applications the carrier community should be looking to its performance management vendors for help assuring customer experience in the face of potentially changing network architectures and business models. I think that NetScout’s nGenius Performance Management system with carrier-class scalability and a long history in network and application performance analysis of IP networks and applications is positioned well to help.
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In addition, there’s a lot of interesting information out there. The webinar and supporting documents can be found at the Yankee Group website and additional information on femtocells can be found at the Femto Forum
Do you have thoughts on the likelihood of widespread adoption of femtocells? Other information sources that I should be looking at? Thoughts on timing? Technological feasibility? Market demand? Competing technologies? Compelling applications? I’d love to you hear your thoughts in the comments.
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