Much of the initial market hype for femtocells has been for the residential market. Since then femtocell designs have grown in capacity to fit the enterprise market needs, and are also suitable for Metro-Femto deployment. Are residential femtocells still the best initial route for new network operators to take? We describe three alternative types of femtocell rollout and discuss which is the best initial path.

The recent rumour that BT, a fixed network operator in the UK and also an MVNO, is to offer femtocells may or may not prove correct. While we don’t tend to work on rumours alone, it does open up a potential new business model that is worth exploring. Here are a few thoughts on the topic.

With the recent flurry of activity in Japan which now has all three major networks offering femtocells commercially, I thought it might be time to checkup on China and see what’s been happening there. There's also an upcoming femtocell conference in Beijing next month which makes this even more topical.

Amazon has stirred up the eBook reader world by reducing the price of a Kindle to as low as $139, the second price drop in a few months.  The international version (which uses 3G GSM) has also been revamped and discounted. The Wall Street Journal estimates that sales have reached around 3.5 to 4 million units to date, comparable to Apple’s iPad 3.3 million units by the end of June. The eBook platform war is livening up!

Is the industry making much progress about enabling femtocell applications? There's been a lot of focus on the so-called greater femtocell - expanding the vision from residential to enterprise, rural and metro environments. But is that at the expense of femtocell applications?

I asked Dr. Mustafa Ergen, Director of Research and Technology at Argela, about their market positioning, which centres on open standards both for the Iu-h interface and for femtocell applications.

When mobile operators wanted to encourage their customers to use their mobile phones instead of their fixed landline phones, some introduced special pricing plans that offered discounted calls when at home or nearby. Sometimes called Fixed Mobile Substitution (FMS), these low calling rates encouraged users to make the switch. I believe this approach makes no sense for operators who offer mobile broadband data at home - unless they do so using femtocells.

With the rapid takeup of smartphone applications and cloud computing, you’d think there wasn’t a place left for femtocells to differentiate. Here we look at the different places where the intelligence for femtocell applications can reside, and trade-off the benefits and disadvantages.

We caught up with Nigel Toon, CEO of picoChip at the revent Femtocell World Summit. In this interview, Nigel explains what he plans to do with picoChip’s recently raised $20 million investment funding, shares his views on the state of the femtocell marketplace and how picoChip plans to address it. We've also recorded a 5 minute video interview with Nigel taken at last month's Femtocell World Summit.