Sprint Expands its Femto Footprint
Posted Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:37:06 EDT by Aditya Kaul
The announcement of Sprint to offer femtocells to its wholesale partners strengthens its position as a leading femtocell operator. Sprint is using its wholesale supplier strength to allow its partners to take advantage of femtocells. Although Sprint has used the femtocell largely as a churn reduction tool, this announcement indicates that femtocells can go beyond that, adding additional revenues, also be an effective go-to-market strategy for an MVNO or carrier.
The lucky few include not just existing wireless MVNOs but also its wireline and cable partners who now have a good reason to seriously consider adding a wireless component to their business. Femtocells in some ways reduces the barriers to entry for a greenfield operator or MVNO. A good example of this is Cox, who is a classic wireline incumbent looking to enter into the wireless business, taking advantage of Sprint’s existing network to launch initial services. Femtos could be a good fit for Cox.
There is some indication that Sprint will only offer it for post-paid services, largely owing to technical limitations on the device. However, with many of its MVNO partners, dying to get their hands on the femtocell, the post-paid restriction should not necessarily prevent them taking advantage of femtocells.
This announcement could also be a precursor for other MVNO-supporting mobile carriers across the world, to use femtocells as a differentiating strategy. More importantly this is a healthy development for the femtocell market, as operators like Sprint seem to have the confidence that they could take femtocell deployments up a notch, and that their backend core network systems and the macro network itself is capable of handling additional femtocells on their network.
Its still not clear as to when Sprint will move its strategy from largely a voice-oriented 2G service to a 3G EVDO data-oriented femto service. However, this along with the recent WiMAX and Femto Forum announcement to work on a WiMAX femto specification is a good indication that femtocells are slowly moving from a niche market solution to a mass-market one.