Vodafone Access Gateway (femtocell) launched in UK
Posted Wed, 1 Jul 2009 09:01:22 EDT by Aditya Kaul
Its July 1st and Vodafone have officially launched their access gateway product in the UK. For those who are wondering what this is - its a femtocell with a curious title. Although Vodafone had made a press announcement at the Femto World Summit last week, its nice to see how they are packaging and presenting it to customers here in the UK. Some initial observations
1. Apart from buying it directly for £160, it is being bundled with various free phones right from Sony Ericsson C510 to Nokia N97, all of which are 3G phones. However most plans come with voice minutes and texts, except the N97 and Samsung Tocco which come with unlimited data.
2. The N97 is obviously a device that they are trying to showcase here, which comes with 3000 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited minutes - but at a hefty price of £75 for 24 months.
3. There is no bundling with any of the laptops or mobile broadband plans, which is disappointing.
4. Vodafone do not advertise it on their main website or the shop upfront. One has to dig down deeper into the Accessories section to find the Vodafone Access Gateway. Once you get there the only option that I saw is the £160 one time fee. Although they do mention the bundling with plans, they ask customers to pop into their stores for more details. Although they do have a separate webpage with the details of the mobile voice plans (if you Google it) I don't see any link from the Accessories page leading to it.
5. They ask for a 1Mbps broadband line at minimum and so in case you want to do heavy data usage over your N97, you won't obviously go very far in case you are at the bottom end of the scale.
6. They advertize that you can share with 4 people at once and so they are clearly going after a family bundle, but there is no family bundle specifically being offered. Maybe if you call them they could put together something for you.
Its good to see that Vodafone have accelerated their femto rollout plans and taken many of their competitors by surprise. However, the bottomline is that the Vodafone Access Gateway, although a 3G device compatible for 3G phones is being marketed for voice and not data usage. Vodafone clearly keeping their cards close to their chest when it comes to femtocells. I shall be elaborating on the implications of this announcement in much more detail on an Analyst Insight - to come out very soon.