Femtocells and the in-home coverage they could enable for mobile triple-play services could be the key for growth at wireless service providers, which are now facing market saturation for their bread-and-butter cellular services in the developed world.
That¡¯s the word from research firm In-Stat, which expects worldwide femtocell subscriptions (installed devices) to grow to 40.6 million by 2011, with femtocell end users reaching 101.5 million in that time span.
Allen Nogee, In-Stat analyst, said femtocells are practical for both the near and long term and seem to have no practical limitations.
Femtocells are small base stations that can either be installed at the edge of carrier networks, just outside buildings, for better in-building coverage, or within the buildings in which they provide coverage. This technology is growing in importance as cell phones increasingly become the communications devices of choice ¨C whether users are outside moving around the world or within the confines of their homes, office buildings or other structures. Femtocells could also be a key component in the fixed/mobile convergence services that promise to allow folks to move between cellular and in-building Wi-Fi/wireline broadband networks seamlessly.
Indeed. The majority of mobile phones calls in 2007 is expected to be made within buildings, while just 30 percent of mobile calls originate while wireless subscribers are outside, according to research firm Deloitte.