WiMAX

WiMAX Featured Articles

More WiMAX Community Stories

February 17, 2010

Femtocells Significantly Improve 3G, WIMAX and LTE Business Case: Report

By Rajani Baburajan
TMCnet Contributor

A research conducted by The Femto Forum, an independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide, finds that operators can use femtocells to efficiently manage rapidly growing mobile broadband usage while also making a healthy return on their investment – in typical cases by more than ten times.
 
The research analyzes the femtocell business case for 3G, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access or “WiMAX” and Long Term Evolution or “LTE (News - Alert)” operators trying to manage the surge in data usage from smartphones, dongles and iPad like Internet access devices.
 
“Over the past 12 months there has been an explosion in data usage due to dongles, netbooks and touchscreen smartphones,” said Simon Saunders (News - Alert), The Femto Forum’s chairman, in a statement. “Now that tablets like the iPad promise to further add to the network load, operators are looking at new and innovative ways to leverage this growth and turn it into an opportunity.”
According to Saunders, femtocells properly targeted to complement and enhance macrocell deployments represent the most economical means for operators to deliver a managed mobile broadband service that meets subscriber capacity and service quality demands.
 
The research looked at the impact of femtocells on a variety of operator scenarios both large and small, both incumbent and new entrant, according to The Femto Forum. The study specifically focused on a 3G operator looking to improve the mobile broadband business case using femtocells across four different consumer and enterprise market segments, a European 3G femtocell operator upgrading to LTE and a greenfield operator deploying either LTE or WiMAX (News - Alert) in Asia.
 
The study found that the femtocell business case in these cases increases as data use continues to increase and as operators move from purely coverage-driven femtocell deployments to ones based on macrocell-offload, performance enhancement, and personalized home-zone and office-zone services.
 
In the 3G and next generation cases studied using a customer lifetime perspective, the macrocell-offload network savings exceed the cost of the femtocell, the study said. This suggests that the risk an operator takes in supplying the market with femtocells is lower than some believed.
 
The Femto Forum study found that an operator offering either 3G or dual-mode LTE/HSPA femtocells is able to realize a return of 10 times on their LTE/HSPA femtocell service investment across a wide range of mobile broadband customers. It further said that an operator offering 3G femtocells is able to double the customer lifetime value of carefully targeted mobile broadband households.
 
A sample European operator with 10 million subscribers deploying femtocells to 10 percent of their customer base is able to realize a return on their incremental femtocell investments of more than 10 times, the research finds. The case is strong even for a regional operator deploying only a few thousand femtocells.
 
Femtocells (News - Alert) also improve customer experience in LTE or WiMAX deployments, the study reveals. A study in a major Asian market indicates that an operator could fund such a mass deployment of femtocells by deferring macro cellular rollouts for 36 months in as little as 7.5 percent of the planned coverage area.
 
The study was carried out by Signals Research Group, a U.S.-based wireless telecommunications consultancy. The Femto Forum is presenting the complete results in a dedicated daily session at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in the Femtozone, The Femto Forum announced.
 

Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Marisa Torrieri


comments powered by Disqus