Femtocell's market is growing fast, but this isn't enough to become mainstream in nearest future, according to a new study from Berg Insight.
In it's latest report, Berg announced femtocell shipments will grow from 200,000 units this year, to 12 million units globally in 2014, with success mostly based in Europe, North America and "advanced markets in the Asia-Pacific region".
"By 2014, there will be almost six femtocells per macro base station and the number of users that connect to a femtocell on a regular basis is estimated to surpass 70 million," it said.
At the same time report noted, that "the femtocell concept is still at an early stage with few commercial deployments. It will take several years before shipments of femtocells become substantial".
The main constraint in femtocell usage growth is competition with WiFi. More and more user devices are WiFi-capable, so there is only small need to buy and deploy another device in Home environment. At the moment, femtocell has advantage by providing Voice connectivity for 3G users. But with growth of IMS, there will be no needs to have Voice connection other then VoIP.
Marcus Persson, telecom analyst at Berg, said femtocells need to bring "significant value" beyond Wi-Fi to persuade consumers to hop on it. This may be better (if compare with WiFi) radio spectrum usage and interference resistance. "Femtocells also need to become sufficiently standardized to ensure efficient integration and low cost per unit," Marcus Persson added.
Concluding all above, I can say that it's a long way until femtocells come into our live as WiFi did.
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