Infonetics (News - Alert) Research, an international market research and consulting firm serving the communications industry, has released excerpts from its first quarter Femtocell Equipment market share and forecast report.


Infonetics Research (News - Alert) remains cautiously optimistic that femtocells have sufficient market drivers and support among operators to sustain year-over-year growth through 2016. The report highlighted that the Femtocell (News - Alert) market ignited by tight vendor battles, price erosion and shift to the enterprise.

In this report, Infonetics Research tracks femtocells by market segment, technology and form factor.

“A slight dip in 3G femtocell revenue per unit held back overall revenue growth in the femtocell market in the first part of the year, but price erosion is an important factor that will drive long-term volume growth,” said Richard Webb, directing analyst for microwave, mobile offload and mobile broadband devices at Infonetics Research. “Femtocell price erosion is due to a combination of factors, including new component suppliers entering the fray, manufacturing efficiencies, and the continuing scale-up of femtocell shipment volumes.”

Infonetics expects the share of consumer femtocells to shrink from 74 percent of the total market to 30 percent between 2011 and 2016. In the same period, public space femtocell share will triple to 25 percent, and enterprise femtocell revenue share will grow the most, making up almost half the global market by 2016.

In the first quarter, the global 2G and 3G femtocell revenue dipped 2.7 percent in 1Q/2012, even as femtocell unit shipments grew 14 percent. Due to strong shipments in North America, Airvana returned to the number one position on the femtocell revenue market share leader board. At the same time Samsung fell to 2nd, and Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) beat Cisco/ip.access for 3rd place on the list.

Airvana was recently in the news when Cellcom partnered with Airvana and Taqua to help smaller operators in North America offer high-speed wireless service using femtocells. The three companies have developed FemtoCloud platform, which they want to use for offering FemtoCloud-as-a-service to CDMA operators in the United States.


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Edited by Braden Becker