Late last week when Sprint-Nextel announced their 3G femtocell, I was taken back.  Sprint decided to change its strategy from charging for femtocells access to instead giving these devices away for free.  Providing free femtocells was the viewpoint I believed was most beneficial for wireless carriers when I discussed this topic in depth in my femtocell research paper.  When the retention of a subscriber cost along with the cost due to additional mobile usage is factored into the equation, in many situations the cost savings to a wireless carriers easily pays for the femtocell hardware.  While Sprint-Nextel probably didn’t use my research, it is good to know that others agree with my findings.  Keeping with similar viewpoints, a recent survey on the Wireless Industry website, FierceWireless.com, asked viewers which technology they believed would be used to offload data traffic in the future.  In my paper I argued that Wi-Fi offloading was the ideal solution once 4G networks were launched, and that femtocells were only a temporarily solution due to their complexity and cost.  Only 24% of respondents believed that femtocells were the solution, further bolstering my findings in my paper.  Until 4G networks are widespread, femtocells are the solution and it will be interesting if other wireless carriers follow in Sprint’s footsteps.

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