I have spent the last six months working on my RIT Graduate Project involving Femtocells.  After a great deal of research and writing over 80 pages, I have come to the conclusion that femtocells will not be the magical solution to capacity and coverage issues for wireless carriers.  This was a very surprising conclusion as numerous experts and companies supporting the technology have a much different viewpoint.  In my paper I discuss how I came to my conclusion and outlined that femtocells are a temporary solution until Wi-Fi chipsets are universal to all cell phones.   In the current market place, wireless carriers don’t seem to be pushing femtocells, but instead Wi-Fi based solutions which not only offer greater capacity but are also cheaper to deploy.  AT&T Wireless has had great success with offloading data usage by deploying Wi-Fi access point, something that femtocells have yet to deliver.  I could be completely wrong in my analysis, but I believe that Wi-Fi will be the perfect companion to 4G networks.    Until 4G coverage is widespread femtocells will be play an important role in expanding coverage, but I believe their deployments will be limited.

Click Here to Download my Femtocell Paper