NEC in talks with operators for 3G femtocell

NEC Corporation announced the launch of its 3G femtocell solution in India. The trial for its deployment is already in progress with a private 3G mobile operator in India.
The company claims that the solution will not only enable operators to offer high-quality, high-speed 3G mobile services to its enterprise and residential consumers but will also speed up the process.
Femtocells are small, low-powered, indoor base stations for 3G mobile phone networks that are sold to subscribers who face connectivity problems at their office or place or residence etc.
They help improve mobile phone reception indoors and are sold by operators struggling with network congestion, worldwide. They are a much cheaper alternative to setting up more mobile phone towers.
Popular opinion is that data consumption right now is not high enough in India to warrant femtocell deployment. However, the company is pretty positive about its success with operators rolling out 3G services.
Anil Kohli, general manager, indoor solutions, network solutions division, NEC informed, "We expect to deploy more than a million femtocells in the coming two years in India."
Takayuki Kano, deputy managing director, NEC Corporation, added that the company is eyeing revenue of around $100 million (about Rs 440 crore) from its femtocell business. Indian contributed revenue of $200-$250 million (approximately Rs 885-1100 crore) to the company's global revenue of $49 billion (more than 22,100 crores) in the last financial year.
The company has not set higher targets for this fiscal mainly because of DoT's stand on equipment clearance.
Kohli added, "It's the right time to introduce the solution in the Indian market. With 3G coming in, the solution would help operators to provide good quality of services indoor and femtocells with also help relieve spectrum congestion with is very important in the Indian context."
The focus with femtocells is to provide good network coverage indoors with the rollout of 3G services. 3G has inherent challenges such as unreliable indoor coverage even though a majority of mobile traffic (70-80 per cent) is generated indoors.
The femtocell solution uses a customer's DSL or broadband connection to connect to the operator's network. It can work well even at speeds of 256 Kpbs, and a single femtocell covers an area of 50 million.
A single femtocell costs around $100 and NEC says its adoption would depend on how operators market the product. They could give it free or charge a monthly fee or bundle it with other services.
Benefits to operatorsThe main benefit of the deployment of this solution to an operator is the reduction in its operating and capital expenditure.
Atsushi Kuroda, general manager, international sales and operations business unit,  NEC said, "femtocell promises 3G services with significant CAPEX and OPEX reduction for India's 3G mobile operators who must ensure low network costs after the high cost of 3G licensing."
The operational costs for the operators will go down as there is no cell planning involved, there are no powered bills plus network management becomes much simpler.
In addition, femtocells will also offload capacity from the operator's network and they can even utilise the deployment of femtocells as a new source of revenue.
Kholi further added, "This will lead to creation of new apps and services and will initiate cloud services and cloud computing and SaaS on mobile devices. A popular application that we are talking for with operators is named Child Safety."
He explains, "This service leverages the fact that operators are able to detect whether the user is on macro or femtocell network. In this service, parents get a text message informing them whenever their child comes home or leaves home."
Benefits to consumersFemtocell will enable improved coverage indoors implying that a customer can expect high definition voice quality with high data speeds indoors without calls drops.
Also, an operator can offer attractive tariffs similar to other countries. Usually, usage charges in a femtocell network are low compared to the macro network.
NEC has eight contracts worldwide with mobile operators for femtocell system deployments which make up nearly half a million femtocell devices. In addition, NEC has 16 femtocell system trials in progress or that have been completed with mobile operators around the world. Trials are on in the Middle East, APAC, and Singapore etc.