Why Femtocells Aren't Taking OffWhy Femtocells Aren't Taking Off

It seems to me a femtocell is a no brainer for the carriers to push. These miniature cell phone base stations go in your house and connect to your broadband internet service. This is ideal for people that have a number of dead spots in their house or no coverage at all if in a rural area. Their use, however, remains very low.The first problem is, the consumer has to buy them, and they aren't cheap. This makes absolutely no sense to me. I know a number of people that live near large cities but for whatever reason, few or none of the big four carriers, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile, have usable levels of coverage in their neighborhood. It would seem to me that for a two year contract, the carriers would win customer loyalty by providing a femtocell for free or for a very low fee in these cases, even if one of the competitors later put up a tower near their home. Verizon charges $250 for their femtocell. That's just too much, even if there is no monthly fee.

Femtocells could also offload bandwidth. If AT&T gave a Microcell, their version of the femtocell, to all iPhone users, it could significantly reduce traffic that has caused AT&T so much bad publicity. The problem is, AT&T charges a monthly fee of $9.99 to $19.99 unless you have both their land line and broadband internet service. Why should anyone pay a monthly service fee to offload AT&T's voice and data bandwidth to the internet? To make matters worse, there are only a few zip codes in the US that AT&T is servicing with their Microcell. The rollout had been very slow.

Peter Jarich at Fierce Wireless discusses a presentation he made on why he doesn't yet have a femtocell. His reasons, coupled with mine above, make the femtocell story very tough to sell to the average consumer, even though there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of consumers that could make use of them. Each one would take a burden off of the carriers network and reduce the need to put up expensive towers and base stations in some rural areas.