Europe Ireland : The femtocell industry is currently focusing on the short term – getting initial trials in place, developing standards, and securing commitments for early commercial deployment. These are all critical to validate the market, raise the profile of the femto concept, and stimulate finance and investment. A central marketing proposition is that femtocells can work with normal 3G handsets, without needing subscribers to be provided with expensive upgrades to their existing phones.

But while focus is good – and the industry does not want unnecessary distractions – there is a risk of medium-term failure if certain future problems are not addressed early enough, even if this muddies the waters of the short-term marketing message. Already, femto proponents are talking up massmarket business models that go beyond simple indoor coverage and macro-network offload. They are talking about 10’s of millions of subscribers, and new “in-home” services for users, that exploit fast and cheap local mobile connectivity.

It is at that stage that handset innovations become more important. In part, this relates to complexities in managing the radio environment and mobility between femtocell and macrocell networks. Various optimisations are desirable, especially when dense deployments of femtos occurs. These drive changes in areas such as the way the phone “selects” cells on which to register. There may also need to be ways to offer provisioning and “guest access” on femtocells, from the handset UI. But the medium-term hopes of the industry also reflect the notion that people will use their cellphones differently when in range of femtos. There will be different applications and behavioural patterns when people are at home – perhaps content backups, podcasts or even advertiser-sponsored TV programming. The mobile phone may need to linked to TV, PC, HiFi or other items of domestic technology.

This report argues that if the phone will be used differently, it needs to be designed differently as well. Standard phones can work with femtocells, but they are not optimised. Certain applications may only work when the phone is within femto range – but they need to know when that is. Yes, some services can be notified by the core network that the user is “at home”, but that approach doesn’t scale to a wide base of operators, application developers and handset/OS vendors. The phone needs to be “aware” of the femtocell, ideally both in the radio and the application platform.

Changing such elements is not quick. The handset industry is much more complex and slow-moving than many in the wider wireless business understand. It takes often 2-3 years for changes in handset architecture to reach commercially-sold handsets, and another 2-3 years to reach a broad range of devices and reasonable penetration within the user base.

Beliefs that the femtocell industry needs to be much more openminded about the need for modifying and optimising handsets – and to be alert to the huge time and effort it will take to achieve. Other mobile developments like UMA and IMS have suffered in the past from a lack of focus on this issue. Although many femto advocates fear distractions could delay immediate market acceptance, early consideration of these “2nd order” problems is necessary for longer-term success.

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/354284/femtocellaware_mo) has announced the addition of the "Femtocell-Aware Mobile Handsets" report to their offering.