Stuart Corner
Thursday, 24 January 2008 07:15
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Cisco has secured a stake in the nascent market for 3G femtocells, with a strategic investment in UK startup ip.access, which is a market leader in the technology. It could make a big impact down the track.
Femtocells are very small low cost, low capacity cellular base stations which are deployed and managed by a cellular network operator but are installed into customers' premises, including residential dwellings, and connected into the network over the consumer's broadband connection. If installed in the home they would serve only the occupant of the home.
For mobile operators they have a number of attractions: they enable it to 'own' all a customer's communications; they enable it to provide reliable coverage in hard to reach dwellings without the expense of ramping up coverage in the main network; in areas of high demand they take traffic off the main network freeing up capacity to be used for public area coverage. Analysts are predicting a huge market for femtocells: a recent report from IDATE forecasts that 10 million UMTS femtocells will ship worldwide in 2010, rising to 18 million in 2011.
Ip.access is already cash-positive from its existing 2G picocell business - deployed in more than 30 live networks around the world and claimed to be the world's most deployed picocell solution for cellular networks - and has secured funding from an impressive array of industry supporters for its Oyster 3G femtocell, in trials with several major mobile network operators around the world.
The use of ADSL for backhaul makes femto cells ideal for integration with ADSL modems, and other home gateway technology, which is no doubt what has sparked Cisco's interest. Already there have been a number of 'pairings' of femtocell makers with manufacturers of complementary technologies. ip.access itself in early 2007 forged a partnership with French electronics giant, Thomson. The two companies announced that they were collaborating to offer an integrated DSL residential gateway platform with 3G femtocell to mobile operators.
