DoCoMo: No signs of Femto yet
NTT DoCoMo has decided to take the WiFi route for its residential FMC service, Home U. The service provider today announced what it calls Japan’s first residential FMC service. Apparently the Femto option has been shelved for a while. This is in fact the second iteration of dual mode WiFi-GSM based convergence undertaken by DoCoMo. The first one was initiated 2 years ago and is targeted at the enterprises.
DoCoMo has been testing Femtocell based FMC for over a year now. It had plans to offer Femtocell based FMC service late last year. The absence of Femto in the Home U offering carries some meaning for sure. A DoCoMo contact says WiFi based FMC is more user friendly. However the Femto testing is still on.
Home U, SIP based FMC utilizing NEC technology, comes with a single number service, and enables DoCoMo to offload both voice traffic as well as data traffic onto the user’s home broadband connection.
T-Mobile USA also decided recently to leverage WiFi instead of Femto. While the interest in Femtocells has heightened over the last two years, there are no meaningful commercial deployments yet. From an end user perspective there are benefits with both WiFi and Femto options. My personal opinion is that while Femto may see some patches of deployments, it is up against the ubiquity of WiFi and will therefore not become mainstream for the foreseeable future, if at all.
There are some Femto trials going on in Japan as well. Softbank has been trialing since June 2007.
