2013 will be the year of Femtocells-AnalystInforma Telecoms & Media revealed that the number of femtocells deployed worldwide is predicted to surpass 40 million by 2013, a rollout that could generate savings of $5 billion for operators, provided they plan carefully. Analyst suggests that 2013 will be the year of the femtocell. Since femtocells are making use of the customer’s existing broadband connection, inturn generating cost savings of billions of dollars.
According to Informa, mobile operators would theoretically have to invest $13.8 billion in their macro networks in order to match the traffic carrying capability of the 22 million femtocells deployed in 2013. Taking into account the fact that operators already have a certain amount of capacity redundancy in their networks, enough to handle around 33% of the required extra capacity, this sum is likely to be closer to $9 billion.
Anayst said that “Operators will have to invest a substantial amount of money if they want femtocell services to gain popularity.” Analyst also warned mobile operators selling femtocells in a sporadic fashion, via their usual channels. In addition to making it difficult to manage the femtocell access points and related infrastructure, most importantly, this would mean the operator would not be able to make any capex or opex savings,” analyst further said. For the effective substitution of macro network capacity they must be deployed in clusters, Informa persists.
