Airvana Blog

Thank you for visiting Airvana at Mobile World Congress!

I would like thank all the mobile operators, partners, suppliers, analysts and press who visited Airvana's stand at Mobile World Congress last week. Thanks to your support and participation, the show was a success for us.

I hope that you were able to witness the new products that we demonstrated at the show, including:

• 16 simultaneous voice calls on Airvana's high-capacity HubBub femtocell
• New, compact, consumer femtocell hardware
• Several value-added femtocell services based on femto presence, local IP access, and remote break in.

Airvana enterprise and residential products were also on display in NEC’s booth, where NEC demonstrated the only live Iuh voice call at Mobile World Congress!

If you were not able to visit MWC and would like to see our 16-call or femto services demonstrations, you can check them out on TelecomTV here.

Femtocells Come to CES

Game systems, HDTVs, digital cameras, e-books… make room for the newest consumer product category: femtocells! This week femtocells come to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the first time.  The FemtoZone at CES will be a booth dedicated entirely to femtocells.  The FemtoZone is run by the Femto Forum, an industry organization of more than 100 companies spanning the ecosystem from chip vendors to mobile operators. 

At the FemtoZone, visitors will see the latest femtocell devices.  They will also be able to sit in on a range of educational sessions covering all aspects of femtocell technology and business.  Airvana’s own Dave Nowicki will deliver presentations on How Femtocells Boost Mobile Broadband and the Femto Forum’s Femtocell Business Case.  CES will also feature a femtocell panel session with speakers from Sprint, Comcast, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung, moderated by Femto Forum Chair Simon Saunders.

CES marks femtocells’ transition from mobile industry specialists to the consumer electronics mainstream.  It will be revealing to see how they are perceived.  In our next posting, we’ll share our observations from the show floor.

Why not Rev B?

Everyone is talking these days about the inevitable march towards 4G due to the increased demand in wireless data capacity.  For existing wireless operators, this means planning and investing in new LTE or WiMAX networks, an expensive and time-consuming proposition.  Operators like Verizon Wireless and Sprint have been aggressive in their rollout plans for LTE and WiMAX, respectively, while continuing to invest in their existing 3G data networks.  AT&T, on the other hand, has also publicized plans to move to LTE, but their 4G timeframes are further out than Verizon and Sprint.  AT&T has chosen to meet the short-term demand by deploying HSPA 7.2, a solution that addresses the hungry iPhone appetite for data via a software upgrade to their existing 3G network.  Apple has taken advantage of this network upgrade with their new 3GS iPhones (and, coincidentally, compelled many existing iPhone users to upgrade their phones…).

 For CDMA operators who have deployed EV-DO wireless data networks, a software upgrade solution also exists to meet wireless data demand in the short term: Multi-carrier Rev A (aka Rev B).  This solution provides comparable peak throughput speeds to HSPA7.2 (6.2 Mbps downstream vs. 7.2 Mbps for HSPA), requires no network equipment upgrades, and maintains backwards compatibility with existing handsets.  Asian operators such as KDDI and CTC have announced plans to deploy Multi-carrier Rev A in their EV-DO networks. 

However, the biggest headwind for North American CDMA operators in deploying this network upgrade is a handset as bandwidth hungry as the iPhone.  The Droid, the Palm Pre, and the Storm2 are potential contenders to drive this data demand, and time will tell if users of these devices will require faster wireless data speeds.   By that time, however, the decision device manufacturers will need to make is whether to offer upgrades to these popular devices with a) LTE/WiMAX support or b) Multi-carrier Rev A support.  My bet is on the Droid to pull ahead and set the bar for data demand among EV-DO devices, primarily due to its lead in application inventory (but that discussion is for another post).  It will be interesting to follow the Droid through 2010 to see how it affects both Verizon Wireless and Motorola’s strategy for addressing the user’s demand for wireless data capacity.  Perhaps the Droid popularity will force both of their hands to move to a Multi-carrier Rev A solution in the short term in lieu of deploying a nationwide LTE network.

Confession is good for the Cell

We’ve become accustomed to hearing consumers—or journalists and bloggers on consumers’ behalf—bash mobile phone companies for their coverage problems.  Dead Zones has built a franchise on it.  More recently, we see mobile operators bashing each other, most notably in the merciless advertising wars between Verizon and AT&T.

Now, we are even beginning to see mobile operators start to bash themselves, albeit in a more genteel fashion than when others are doing it to them.  As far back as August, the Femto Hub reported on NTT DOCOMO’s TV ad campaign encouraging subscribers to report coverage holes.  Last week we saw SFR’s amusing online video equating lack of indoor coverage with lost love—and showing the converse to be equally true. 

Now AT&T seems to have joined the parade with a new iPhone App called “Mark the Spot”.  Mark the Spot allows users to report dropped calls and other coverage problems with a single press of a button.  The information is relayed directly back to network engineers.  Although AT&T does not specify precisely how they will use the information, this appears to be a sincere and open effort to identify problem areas. This is consistent with the web 2.0-style business practice of using customer knowledge to improve the service. Mark the Spot does not specifically reference femtocells as a solution, but with AT&T’s Microcell already launched, “fill the spot” with a femtocell isn’t a hard leap to make.

The Simple Argument Wins

SFR, France’s second largest telecommunications operator, recently launched their commercial femtocell offering with an amusing on-line advertisement. It is worth a look -- and you don’t need to be fluent in French to get the point. For those who are language challenged like me, "C’est quoi ton code?" translates to "What’s your code?"

What is most interesting? So far, SFR is the only European operator willing to market the fact that that indoor coverage is an issue. And they are marketing femtocells with a crystal clear headline: femtocells improve indoor coverage, period.

To get consumers interested in any product, the message needs to be dead simple. SFR gets that. Mobile operator business models have been carefully worked and analyzed. And rightly so – these are complex systems representing a lot of money and a great deal of integration effort. But in the end, the demand from end customers must be based on solving a simple problem. The reason for someone to buy a femtocell must to be something you can explain to your average house painter in less than thirty seconds.

In this country, I have never encountered a person who didn’t understand the idea – plug this widget into your Internet connection and get five bars of coverage in your home. And the answer is always the same, "When can I get one?"

Congratulations, SFR.