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Different femtocell vendors were prominent at February's Mobile World Congress compared to the April 2008 CTIA exhibition in the US. This made me think about whether femtocell vendors have decided to focus on one or other of the two leading 3G mobile phone technologies.
Broadly speaking, the GSM family (which includes acronyms like UMTS, HSPA and WCDMA) dominates the industry with over 85% of all mobile phones . The main competing technology in the past has been CDMA (not to be confused with WCDMA) with acronyms including 1xRTT, EV-DO. This still has a strong foothold in the North American market, but has lost much ground in the rest of the world. The advertised evolution is LTE (Long Term Evolution) a new radio interface which has been adopted by both GSM and CDMA operators in their medium to long term roadmaps. Whilst CDMA has fewer subscribers, the North American market is potentially more attractive for femtocells in the short/medium term. It has a growing mobile subscriber base (but nowhere near as saturated as Western Europe), most of which are prepaid, yet there is poor coverage in many areas (especially suburban) with high levels of broadband cable/DSL penetration. The business case on the basis of poor coverage for voice is quite attractive in the US, and has received good initial response in the media. Sprint has had a soft-launch of commercial service in two regions since September 2007, but is reported to have put this on hold due to technical issues. Verizon, the largest operator in the US is reported planning a 2008 launch of femtocell products during CTIA. The table below summarises our research into which technologies each femtocell vendor has announced they are addressing: | | UMTS
(GSM Family) | CDMA | | Airvana | Y | Y | | Airwalk | | Y | | Alcatel-Lucent | Y | | | Hay | Y | | | Huawei | Y | | | ip.access | Y | | | Motorola | Y | Resell
Airvana | | Radioframe | Y | | | Samsung | Y | Y | | Ubiquisys | Y | | | ZTE | Y | |
I’d also comment that I’ve not seen any announcement incorporating CDMA femtocell technology into a DSL modem as yet. However, since Airvana have provided the femto board for Thomson’s DSL modem product, presumably Thomson could develop a CDMA variant fairly easily. Its also worth noting that in the US, there is a far higher penetration of broadband cable modems than DSL. Motorola may be quite well positioned to address this because they are one of the leading cable set top box vendors, and have an OEM agreement with Airvana for CDMA femtocells. To summarise, pretty much everyone (apart from Airwalk) is claiming to be offering (or will offer) UMTS, the 3G version of GSM – perhaps not surprising since this technology family is so widely adopted and successful around the world. Only three vendors are offering CDMA femtocells at present. And only one is CDMA specific.
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