Femtocells, which are small cellular base stations installed in the home, have been making lots of buzz recently and rightly so. Although at this time Sprint is the only operator in the world who has made femtocells commercially available for purchase, and only in selected cities, many other operators are trialing femtocells and planning to launch them commercially toward the end of this year or in 2009. In-Stat has forecasted that over 21 million will be in use worldwide by 2011.
While femtocell may soon be a part of many people's vocabulary, there is another class of small cellular base station that is getting a new lease on life, the picocell base station. Picocell base stations are not new, and have been used for many years by cellular operators to fill in holes in their network coverage. The problem has been that pico base stations have been fairly costly for operators to install and maintain, relative to the limited increase in capacity which they provide. Most picocells support from 16 to 100 simultaneous cellular users.
Enter the super femtocell, or maybe more correctly named, the enterprise picocell. This device is like a femtocell on steroids. The idea behind it is instead of using multiple femtocells in an enterprise environment, using one customer installed picocell instantly provides an enterprise with additional cellular capacity, coverage, and potential cost savings. An enterprise picocell could potentially provide an enterprise with greatly discounted calling since the enterprise is providing its own backhaul. Enterprise picocells may even offer additional features to its users such as four digit dialing.
As mentioned above, picocell base stations are not new, but what is new is making them so configurable that that an end-user can purchase them at an electronics store and install them themselves. This makes picocells a much more practical solution than was ever before possible.
Enterprise picocells are not here yet, but these devices should start arriving in the next year or two. In-Stat is currently completing a report on this exciting new market, which will also cover the market for femtocells, conventional picocells, and microcell base stations.
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