Vodafone cuts femtos to £50 - or free - in advance of iPhone

vodafone_femto Customers tell us it is life changing,” claims Guy Laurence, Vodafone UK CEO, who has just dropped the price of the “Sure Signal” box 70%. That's wildly exaggerated, of course, even if you live in a basement; your life isn't ruined if you have to use a landline at home, or VOIP over your broadband connection. Femtos and/or WiFi phones are a crucial strategy at nearly every mobile telco, because they move traffic from wireless networks to landlines. The £50 is the cash price for current customers, but Vodafone will also include a femto essentially for free as part of bundles for new customers.

In 2008, nearly all mobile operators realized there's a huge potential saving and includied either a femto or WiFi phones in their (private) plans. If AT&T invests $500M to deploy a cloud of 10M femtos across the U.S., that saves them two or three times as much just in spectrum costs. One Vodafone femto can handle up to four simultaneous calls, and 32 is possible. No carrier has announced plans to use home femtos for neighbors and passerbys, but that's a logical next step. It will need careful limits, especially on low speed upstreams.

A particularly interesting newcomer to femtos is Free.fr, where they are ready to offer a femto as an option with the Freebox even though they don't expect to begin their wireless service until 2012. A standalone femto in small carrier quantities goes for about $100 today, while AT&T received bids around $50 for their planned (but unconfirmed) rollout of 10M. By incorporating that into a box with a power supply, intelligence, antenna, etc., the cost is probably halved. With single chip femtos hitting the market, adding one to an existing broadband box will get cheaper every year. I'd guess Xavier will be able to add a femto in 2013 for $15-30, cheap enough for a payback in months just marketing and spectrum/bandwidth savings.


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