Summary
Still many issues with launch of 3G femtocells, especially with management of devices, may cause additional delay. With vendor consolidation, it is not clear where femtocell vendor may fall and that could add additional confusion and risk.
Analysis
AT&T's 3G coverage is still not in par with Verizon Wireless' network and AT&T has to resort to various techniques, including deployment of femtocells, in order to change the perception and improve quality of coverage. AT&T is currently trialing 200 femtocells with friendly users. This trial has been going on for over 9 months. It seems that there are still a large number of challenges in the large scale launch of femtocells that primarily have to do with provisioning and management of these residential devices. Unless these challenges are overcome, large scale launch could potentially be in jeopardy.
AT&T is in process of going through vendor consolidation and femtocells apparently will fall under radio access technologies that may be primed by Ericsson, ALU, or NSN (or a couple of these vendors). Cisco is the prime vendor, using ip.access technology. Cisco is most likely not going to be in the radio domain and may struggle to keep its foothold in the femto domain, even though neither NSN nor Ericsson have organic 3G femtocell development. ALU is very active in the femtocell and recently announced their deployment with Vodafone and can erode the footprint of Cisco/ip.access.
