Providing full or even adequate mobile residential coverage is a significant challenge for operators. Consumers want to use mobile phones in the home more and more, even when there’s a fixed line available – and many are turning away from standard fixed connections in the home completely.

Femtocells are cellular access points that connect to a mobile operator’s network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections. They have been developed to work with a range of different cellular standards including CDMA, GSM and UMTS.
A recent study from ABI Research forecasts that by 2011 there will be 102 million users of femtocell products on 32 million access points worldwide.

For consumers, this means outstanding mobile coverage in their homes coupled with reduce costs comparable with companies such as Vonage and Skype. It also offers rapid downloading for multimedia content without large data bills and long download times – all without making any changes to existing handsets.

For the mobile operator, femtocells represent a highly cost effective way of increasing both network coverage and capacity in the home, and allow for effective fixed-mobile substitution, by removing the need for users to have separate home phones.