FMC in the UK: Game On!

Today Vodafone announced, during a presentation at the Femtocell World Summit, a new femtocell product for the UK market available July 1. No actual press release yet, but there are several reports from the event.

Details of the offer a bit sketchy, but according to the Register (and other insiders), the Vodafone Access Gateway will cost t £160 as a one-off price. Alternatively there are bundled options with specific phones which run a monthly fee of £15 – £30. There may also be an option for subscribers with high-tariff packages to receive a femtocell for free.

It’s not clear what subscribers get in return. Most obviously, a femto offers excellent indoor coverage. Perhaps users will also get some type of discounted calling when attached to the femtocell.

Of course, Orange has offered it’s Unique service, based on Wi-Fi, in the UK for some time now. While there has never been nation-wide promotion of Unique, it’s estimated the company has sold between 250,000 and 500,000 Unique-enabled devices.

This leaves T-Mobile and O2/Telefonica as the two operators in the UK without some type of Home Zone service bundle. Looks like it’s Game On! for FMC in the UK.

Vodafone Station: Screaming for UMA

As you may have seen, Vodafone announced a new product called “Station”. The original announcement was a bit confusing, but now that the dust has settled, I think it’s becoming clear.

The Station, made by Huawei, is a broadband router/modem. It can use either the integrated ADSL2+ modem or HSPA (via an additional dongle/UBS) for backhaul on the WAN. On the LAN, the Station provides Wi-Fi.

The target is to provide Vodafone subscribers with a broadband WAN connection. The target audience is likely someone using the Voda HSPA network for laptop data access. When at home, the HSPA network may have in-building propagation issues and the throughput/data rate may be low. Enter the Station. Install the Station with your HSPA dongle/USB key near a window to get a strong HSPA signal from the macro network. Then the Station uses Wi-Fi to transmit that signal to the laptop when at home.

So what is the ADSL2+ modem for? Well presumably it is faster to use the fixed network. And while I’m just speculating, I’ll bet they don’t want people sitting in their homes streaming lots of data over the HSPA network. Therefore, to offload the macro network, it’s better to have users running over a fixed line DSL connection. So users can start with HSPA while their DSL line is being installed.

The last wacky part? The Station comes with an analog voice port (ATA). Apparently when using the HSPA dongle, the station provides voice services over via the circuit voice capabilities of HSPA. And given the dongle has a SIM, this is another phone number/service available.

What I don’t understand is when the user transfers to the fixed line DSL connection, what happens to the analog voice service? With no dongle, there’s no way to associate the Station with the Vodafone mobile core. Hummm…

So why is this screaming for UMA?

First, it’s providing Wi-Fi indoors, clearly idea for a dual-mode handset service, and when the service transitions to the ADSL network, even better. With UMA, Vodafone could have a real ‘home zone’ service.

Second, the ATA ports could simply run UMA for the terminal adaptor function. Now the ports would be live/available to the consumer when connected via HSPA and/or DSL. It wouldn’t matter.

As I was writing this, I found a comment on Om Malik’s blog from someone suggesting there was a big opportunity in Wireless WAN and Wireless LAN. But can they build a femtocell (3G LAN) that uses HSPA for the WAN connection? That seems like a lot of 3G in one box, but maybe it’s on the drawing board somewhere.

UK Operators unleash ‘flat rate’ data plans

The BBC reported today that T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and Three offer flat rate price plans for internet access on mobile phones. O2 will launch a plan in October prior to the iPhone launch.

In the article, Richard Warmsley, head of internet at T-Mobile, comments that 500,000 people have signed up for their ‘web and walk’ service in 18 months. Mr. Warmsley goes on to add:

“Half of our customers surf the internet on their mobile when they are at home watching TV. They do not need to go to a laptop and fire it up. The mobile is there for them.”

Key take-away #1: As an operator, if 50% of your data traffic is generated at home, use Wi-Fi and UMA rather than the more expensive macro RAN.

Another interesting point in the article is that flat rate pricing apparently boosts downloads from an average of 0.18 megabytes to 0.60 megabytes, more than 3x in capacity.

Key take-way #2: Is your network ready for a 3x increase in data traffic/capacity, especially when 50% of that traffic is happening at home within range of Wi-Fi and could be off-loaded to broadband & IP?

There is a chart in the article which shows the different rates:

• T-Mobile - £7.50/month (1 GB limit)
• Vodafone - £7.50/month (120 MB limit)
• Orange - £8.00/month (30 MB limit)
• Three - £5/month (1 GB limit)
• O2 - £7.50/month (200 MB limit)

Key take away #3: As an operator, prices for flat rate data plans are going to come down. Clearly Three is already one third the price of the T-Mobile plan. Therefore, making massive capacity investments to support more traffic at less revenue per user is not ideal.

Wi-Fi, IP and broadband look more attractive all the time.