By Telecom Lead Team: Femtocell market leader Airvana achieved $25 million
revenue in Q3 2011, expanding its revenue market share lead significantly.
Global revenue from 2G and 3G
femtocells used in consumer, enterprise and public spaces grew 9 percent
sequentially in the third quarter of 2011, with 2G femtocell revenue declining
and 3G femtocell revenue ramping.
Year over year, global femtocell
revenue is up 37 percent.
W-CDMA/HSPA femtocells accounted for
72 percent of all femtocells shipped in Q3 2011.
4G LTE femtocells are expected to
start shipping in late 2012.
The Cisco/ip.access partnership
maintains its lead in terms of femtocell unit share, and increased its
quarterly femtocell revenue to its second-highest level to date, but did not
gain revenue market share as other players also posted notable gains, including
Huawei and NEC/Ubiquisys.
A growing number of operators are
offering free femtocells to their consumer subscribers, including SFR France,
Softbank in Japan, and Cosmote in Greece.
This year the femtocell market will
scale up significantly and break out into clearer market segments: consumer,
enterprise, and rural and metro public space femtocells. As price points
continue to come down, we expect to see global femtocell revenue nearly double
this year while unit shipments grow at nearly 140 percent compared to 2011,”
said Richard Webb, directing analyst for microwave, mobile offload and mobile
broadband devices at Infonetics Research.
Meanwhile,
chip major Qualcomm announced
expanded availability of the company’s Femtocell Station Modem(FSM)
FSM9216, FSM9816 and FSM9832 enterprise chipsets, Qualcomm’s fully integrated
system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for femtocell development with an extended user
capacity of up to 32 active users.
These
chipsets complement the currently available FSM 3G femtocell chipsets that
feature eight user versions targeting the residential market with hardware and
software compatibility. The company also announced a Femto-Wi-Fi hardware
reference design that integrates these FSM enterprise solutions with Qualcomm
Atheros 802.11n Wi-Fi AR9350 and AR9344 access point solutions.
