Survey Sez 10/31/12

“Operators are still very much focused on using femtocells to deliver better voice coverage, but our 2012 residential femtocell survey identifies a shift toward a more strategic utilization of femtocells for enhancing the mobile broadband experience and as a means for delivering value-added services like virtual home phone numbers and media file sharing,” explains Richard Webb, directing analyst/ Microwave, Mobile Offload and Mobile Broadband devices at Infonetics Research. “The business model for more sophisticated femtocell services remains a big question mark. For the market to evolve, vendors need to help operators on pricing and service models so they can drive volumes and enable new service revenue. If it adds up, there’s a real opportunity to leverage the femtocell to put the mobile network at the heart of the home network—something that’s traditionally been beyond the reach of the mobile operator.” Here are a few more stats: The top drivers for offering residential femtocell services are improving mobile broadband and voice within the home, and offloading data traffic from macro networks; 29 percent of operators surveyed plan to offer FD-LTE femtocell services by 2013; Wi-Fi is increasingly being viewed as complementary by carriers; and service provider respondents project they will have, on average, 211,000 femtocell subscribers by 2013…According to Informa Telecoms & Media, between October and November 2012, the number of small cells has surpassed 6 million, with macrocells worldwide totaling nearly the same. Although the bulk of these numbers are made up of residential femtocells, which will alone overtake the total number of macrocells early next year, they also include enterprise and public-access small cells. There are now 45 small-cell deployments, including nine of the top 10 operators, by revenue globally. The emergence of the Small Cell as a Service (SCaaS) model, which allows third parties to roll out a small-cell network and then rent it to several operators, is lowering the barrier to entry for deployment and total costs. Two new companies – Cloudberry Mobile and ClearSky – have launched their own offerings in Europe and the United States, respectively, targeting smaller operators…The market for the multiformat transcoders that process the content has risen right alongside the content is on the rise, says Multimedia Research Group Inc. (MRG), divided into transcoders that process live streams in real-time and those that process files; both segments are expected to grow well through 2016. Senior Analyst Michelle Abraham adds, "While the file segment will see stable growth, we expect the live market to continue its faster growth due to the number of pay-TV providers and other content owners and producers who are delivering live streams to PCs, tablets and smartphones." And more vendors are offering cloud transcoding options; rather than installing on-premise transcoders, content and service providers have more options to use private or public cloud transcoding services.