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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, July 06, 2009

Curb your excitement, it's a femtocell

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I got a press release the other day with a picture that shows Doug Pulley, CTO at picoChip outside Vodafone’s Bath, UK, store, “heading the queue of people waiting to buy the new Vodafone Access Gateway”. I have suspicions that that some more of the queue might have a degree of correlation with picoChip staff, or might just have been press-ganged from passers-by in the street… but that’s another matter.
No surprise that picoChip’s CTO should be lining up to buy one of the first retail femtocells – picoChip might not have totally bet-the-ranch on the femtocell concept, but if the product concept doesn’t fly, then they might be faced with a hasty search for something else to do with their ingenious symmetrical-array-processor chips.
But: (you knew there was a ‘but’, didn’t you?); Here is one of the communications products that could shape the way 3G and 4G phones are used. Where is the publicity, where is the effort to educate the “non-geek” market on what this might do for them? I happen to be a Vodafone customer: have I had mailings, emails, viral marketing, whatever, telling me that this box is now available and that there is therefore (more? some?) point to having a 3G connection? Uhhh… no. (It is on the Vodafone website, if you’re interested. If you search for it. Under “mobile accessories”. £160, since you ask.)
As you might remember, I have despaired in the past about the almost total inability of the cellular companies to market anything other than voice. Even SMS happened to them by accident, and the only reason they have any 3G high-bandwidth traffic at all is that YouTube fell into their laps – they certainly didn’t sell it in their own right.
Are they lining up to add the femtocell to the long list of products whose marketing they have comprehensively messed up? On this showing, I wouldn’t predict otherwise.

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