Hopefully, it makes it clear why WiFi is not a “Femto killer” and Femto is not a WiFi killer. It is not all black and white. Clearly, SPs would not be deploying Femtocells if they did not see value in them. And customers are indeed paying for Femtocells, so they see value too even if they have WiFi already!

The roll-outs have been slow. We are talking about a major shift for wireless operators — all of a sudden the number of their cell towers is about to explode and they need a new level of self-install, radio tuning, etc. All new concepts for managing wireless infrastructure and not a trivial shift for massive IT organizations! Until self-activation is smooth, the SPs won’t push the APs full throttle. So, we won’t really know how big the femto will be until the vendors offer true plug-and-play solutions and SPs iron out all integration.

the benefit either with femtocells or UMA is so cost effective it’s crazy.

just in the knowledge that you’re hooked up indoors.

i live in an area where i have no bars and have to drive 2 miles to a boatramp to make a wireless call.

i can make wireless calls in my home courtesy of t-mobile hotspot@home.

looks like a no brainer to me.

get my voicemail at the boatramp or get live calls in my living room.

i don’t think anyone if a UMA chipset costs 20 bucks more a phone that works out to less than a buck a month over 2 years.

if a femtocell router costs 250 bucks that works out to 10 bucks a month.

it still hooks you up indoors.

the only people who have a visible downside staring them in the face are the wired telcos.

you know, the nice mega corporations that want to be you sole communications source and just give you what they want instead of all that’s available.

instead of controversy, let’s figure out a way to make it ubiquitous so everybody can go to the dance.

i will buy 2 of the first androids t-mobile markets or 2 verizon droids and a verizon network extender when my t-mobile contract runs out in about a year.

The approach is user friendly with a seamless integration in the phone that also provides handover between ‘homecell’ and macrocell networks. SIP clients & Skype like solutions have major drawbacks here as the user need to launch a particular client and do not provide handover facility.

The problem with UMA is cost as not only an additional Wifi chipset is needed but also a specific UMA client instead of the regular one. The cost is significant as it requires a special hardware design (I would assume the WiFi chipset per se is not the major cost but rather how to integrate it into the phone and avoid radio interferences) and also software licenses associated with the UMA client.

On the other hand Femtocell as no impact on the phone .

I believe it is better and cheaper to add a WiFi chipset in the femtocell in order to provide both 3G signal & Wifi that going the other way around (The UMA way).

PS: If anyone has info on UMA cost (Software client) and any estimate on how much it cost to add Wfi to phone, feel free to drop me an email. I am very interested.

The other unque opportunity for Femtocells is the fill the gap in the “continuum” between the home-car-office. Today, this is not well addressed by WiFi or even celular networks for that matter. Given femtocells can have an extended range well outside the home, this could create gap coverage (like accessing your media server from your car as your car is parked in the driveway or routing your health data to your trainer as your jogging through the neighborhood). Wifi cannot address this.

Having said this, I still think the carriers should subsidize the fentocells giving the fact it allows them to address the 25% of homes that do not have a fixed line phone today and also offload their networks, More importantly, it gives them a gateway into the home. I would love to see a 4G/WiFi gateway (which is available) offered by US carriers as a way to provide the best of both worlds.

-snyder4g

Sure, and I’m not saying femto is the only solution.

But I am saying that WiFi is only fitted on a portion of handsets so for the other portion a different technology is needed. Given that is 90+% of the market, it seems worthy of note….

It is not just voice coverage: as people use more data, femtos are a good way to deliver that: 60% of cellular data is used indoors – which presumably indicates WiFi is not solving people’s problems just yet.

I think the charging model is something we will see different approaches to, which is what you’d expect in competitive markets. Certainly several carriers have femto pricing quite similar to the UMA ones discussed above: free if you use your minutes, or a flat fee for unlimited minutes. There are carriers with more aggressive offers too.

Perhaps 10% of the phones sold this year have WiFi.

Most of those don’t have software to make it easy to use; many of those (as the person above said) have WiFi turned off to save power.

So a box that makes 100% of the phones work better (not a small fraction of a small fraction) is a good thing.

Voice is still the killer app for cellphones, and there are a lot of people using Facebook etc on smartphones who don’t care if it is WiFi or 3G just so long as it works.

Few technologies “replace” another (WiFi didn’t replace Ethernet; WiFi and Bluettoth both sell a lot of chips every year)

Perhaps WiFi is the perfect solution to iPhone users (perhaps…!) — but for everyone else WiFi is not ideal – wheras a femto might be

The idea that femto is justified because of some “home” service seems a bit lame to me. Most “homes” already have WiFi and most other electronics (media server etc.) in the home are WiFi enabled.

Basically femto was designed to complement coverage and imho will find a place an easy to install and maintain pico (i.e. to fill gaps in coverage). Do not see how it can replace WiFi in homes (esp. if the primary benefit is to provide fast data speeds).