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Femtocell Market Faces Mixed Bag Amid Residential Losses and Enterprise Gains

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April 17, 2015

Femtocell Market Faces Mixed Bag Amid Residential Losses and Enterprise Gains

By Steve Anderson, Contributing TMCnet Writer


The connectivity market is driving some impressive new ideas going forward, but with this also comes some distressing possibilities. A new report from ABI Research (News - Alert) shows that the market for indoor connectivity is experiencing its ups and downs, and it's likely that advanced equipment—particularly femtocells—is going to be a big part of that action for some time to come.


The ABI Research report, titled “Enterprise and Consumer Femtocells (News - Alert) Market Research”, looks at this strangely mixed market, and provides a picture that's grim in some senses but alive with possibility in others. The clear high point in the field is the enterprise femtocell market, which ABI Research's study projects will hit nearly $800 million by just 2020. With a variety of new small cells coming out for enterprise use in the market, particularly those focused on LTE (News - Alert)-A capabilities, it's clear that there will be plenty of competitors going after this market. Firms like Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, among others, all had skin in this particular game, offering up services like voice over LTE (VoLTE), carrier aggregation, and others.

But femtocells aren't doing well everywhere, and technological innovation is driving a particularly unpleasant picture for residential femtocells. Wi-Fi calling, for example, is proving a major disruption to the sector, particularly given how operators are looking to keep costs down, according to ABI Research's research analyst Ahmed Ali. Taking advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place would indeed seem to be a good way to do that. But the use of VoLTE and other features, Ali noted, is proving to be a boost for the enterprise section.

Indeed, the femtocell market for enterprise users looks pretty good, but even here, the competition in the field poses some risks to femtocell makers. For instance, the market is somewhat fractured; femtocells work nicely for the small to medium-sized business (SMB) market that's so often prized, but medium to large enterprise users may well be better served by other tools like the distributed radio system (DRS) concept. DRS actually manages to solve a few problems that femtocells have, like issues of interference in the signal, as well as overall scalability. Those are important issues, but even here it's a mixed bag, as femtocells offer clear advantages in terms of ease of setup and use, as well as overall costs.

The problem with the entire market, it would seem, is that for every upshot there's a distinct downside. The femtocell market looks great, until the residential side is considered. But femtocells are making big strides in enterprise, until the sizes of the enterprise are considered. At any time, this entire market could either go completely toes-up or succeed in a staggering fashion. But based on what's seen so far, a comparatively moderate market might well be most expected here, with femtocells gaining and losing a little ground on a fairly regular basis. Still, it's clear that femtocell makers will have to keep the innovation pace high in order to compete in a market with quite a few competitors on hand.




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino







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