VoIP MoVoIP Blog

Femtocells – Another Route to Market ?

September 2nd, 2009

We see that a UK manufacturer of Femtocells has decided to make an attempt to go direct to the consumer market rather than the usual business model of via the Mobile Carriers.

Hay Systems Ltd have ignored the regular route of making deals with Mobile Carriers in favour of a straight to consumer sale. The problem they have is they will need to get agreement with the carriers to do this and so have launched a website  www.femtonow.com where members of the public can register their interest so they can approach carriers with potential numbers of consumers.

The HSL product has the ability to work with any Mobile Carrier, or even multiple Mobile Carriers, over a regular broadband connection. To achieve this HSL needs to do two things: obtain a radio spectrum in which to operate, and integrate into the mobile Carrier’s back end.

We think HSL are going to face a few obstacles, firstly their  Femtocell is 2G rather than 3G and every network operator in the UK is moving towards 3G deployment of Femtocells.  Secondly the Femtocell is attractive to a Mobile Carrier as it is a way to lock your customer’s onto your network increasing the ’stickyness’ of contracts so it is unlikely a carrier would encourage technology that allows customers to move easily from network to network.

We wish Hay Systems well and hope they can succeed in this venture.

See the Press release from HSL here.

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