Wi-Fi in 25% of Homes Globally!

New research from Strategy Analytics indicates that a quarter of homes worldwide or 439 million dwellings, are equipped with Wi-Fi today. The number is expected to grow to 800m units, or 42% penetration, in 2016.

This is a staggering achievement and a testament to the features, capabilities and benefits of Wi-Fi.

Femtos still on the sideline

In an article published this month on Fierce Wireless Europe, Paul Rasmussen writes what many in the industry already know, that femtocells are still on the sidelines.

Mr. Rasmussen quotes Ovum analyst Steven Hartley saying femtos remain to costly and complex for a mass-market coverage solution.

Speaking quite candidly, Ericsson CTO Hakan Eriksson stated "the femtocell solves no p

roblem from my viewpoint."

Pointing out the obvious, Mr. Eriksson goes on to say that "all the devices that are generating mobile data are Wi-Fi enabled."

Not a good coverage play, not a good offload play... it's no wonder Femtos remain on the sidelines.

With more than 200m Wi-Fi access points installed in the world today, it seems that Wi-Fi is the dominate in-building wireless technology.

Wi-Fi Playing a More Crucial Role in US Mobile Carrier Growth

…and femtocells don’t appear to be.

I was reading Roger Cheng’s latest piece covering AT&T’s use Wi-Fi. The company announced they supported 106.9 million Wi-Fi connections in Q2 2010. It’s certainly impressive.

But was struck me more was the utter lack of discussion about femtocells. Recall that just a year or two ago, AT&T’s femtocell launch was eagerly anticipated by the company, along with the mobile (and femtocell) industry.

Yet skip ahead, and AT&T continues to laud its use of Wi-Fi with nary a word on its femtocell deployment. It's like they have fallen to the side of the road.

Perhaps it’s reflected in a release the Femto Forum put out the other day. The Forum announced that there were “more femtocells deployed that macrocells” in the US.

At first blush, that sound like good news… until the details come out.

According to the announcement, there are ‘conservatively’ 350,000 femtocells deployed by Sprint, Verizon and AT&T in the US, versus 256,000 macro cells. But with the ‘big three’ serving about 230 million subscribers, 350k femtocells deployed isn’t very impressive.

Even converting to households, it isn’t much. I found another study which says 75.8m homes in the US have broadband, a pre-requisite for a femtocell, so we're at 0.4% penetration. (versus 62% for Wi-Fi).

I know, femtocells are just getting started, and there’s plenty of room for growth. But at the end of the day, ATT is touting it’s Wi-Fi connection numbers, not it’s femtocell deployments.

Walt reviews femtocells

Walt Mossberg, the venerable consumer technology editor for the Wall Street Journal, reviewed femtocells today.  Specifically, he reviewed the AT&T microcell.

The interested reader can check out the whole article here.

Be sure to read to the end, when Walt describes what it took to make the femtocell work in his son’s basement apartment.  In the end, they needed to use Wi-Fi to extend an Ethernet connection into the basement.

It took Wi-Fi to make the Femtocell work.  Ironic.

Of course, with a Smart Wi-Fi App on the phone, Walt and his son could have gotten the coverage boost of a femtocell, using the Wi-Fi which was already in the apartment.

Kineto Turns UMA into "Smart Wi-Fi Offload"

Today Kineto, a leader in the UMA space, announced a new "Smart Wi-Fi Offload" solution. For all intents and purposes, it looks like they have renamed UMA into "Smart Wi-Fi Offload".

Not that it's a bad thing...

In the four years since UMA was introduced, there have been some major shifts in the market. Early UMA deployments were on focused on fixed-mobile substitution (FMS), and relied on feature phones (remember the Samsung G709?).

At the time, FMS (and FMC) were hot topics, but the mobile industry had never heard of an iPhone and mobile operators all believed that had more network capacity than they could ever want or need.

Skip ahead to 2010, landlines are a dying breed, subscribers are getting larger buckets of minutes and FMS is a natural occurrence. But the industry has been blind-sided by the meteoric rise of the smartphones, specifically web-driven devices like the iPhone and my Touch.

I was in a meeting with an industry analyst the other day who casually mentioned that he believes mobile operators will need to increase their current network capacity 10x in the next 3-5 years.

Consider that number for a minute. It’s staggering.

Now consider this: what are the options for an operator to increase their network capacity by a factor of 10?

• Add more segments and channels onto existing cells? A good, but finite, idea.
• Install more macro cells? Certainly that continues to be important, but even doubling the current number of towers probably wouldn’t increase network capacity 10x.
• Femtocells? Certainly this is an important technology, but there continue to be a range of growing pains.
• Wi-Fi is a great option. It’s already installed in the homes and offices of these ‘smartphone’ users, it doesn’t interfere with the macro network, and now with Kineto’s solution, it can be added as an application to the range of offending smartphones.

The reality is that to achieve a 10x increase in capacity, mobile operators are going to need to do all these things in earnest, starting today.

I think Smart Wi-Fi Offload is a good first step.