Wireless Broadband is “In the House”!

The recent announcement by Qualcomm that they were entering the femtocell market (Joining Cisco in investing in femtocell provider ip.access) provides one more endorsement for this approach to providing broadband wireless everywhere. So what are femtocells and why should I care? Femtocells are mini base-station / access points that are deployed indoors; providing excellent mobile coverage (voice and broadband data). Femtocells are connected to a customer’s wireline broadband service with traffic backhauled to the mobile providers network.

Femtocells solve two of the top challenges facing mobile providers. First, Femtocells allow a mobile provider to offload traffic from their traditional network to a wireline network. With mobile data services growing at over 50% per year, serious network expansion & upgrades would be needed within the next two years; femtocells can forestall millions in network upgrades. Second, Femtocells increase customer satisfaction and pave the way for new service opportunities by dramatically increasing the bandwidth customers enjoy indoors. With femtocells, the mobile providers dream of having customers only use 1 phone, their mobile, is possible. Other services such as real time video and phone to phone video conferencing are now possible.

So what does this mean to managed service providers? This offers a great opportunity to offer new, tightly integrated managed services catering to the “pro-sumer” (professional + consumer); service suites combining business & entertainment offerings. It presents telcos with an opportunity to leverage their wireline and wireless assets to provide more complete managed service suites. It also provides an entry to mobility providers to offer managed business services. What I'm really excited about is what this means in moving our industry closer to mainstream "connected home" services! The “net” is that femtocells in the home and business will dramatically improve the service experience we can all expect from our service providers. The bar is moving higher…