Vodafone Quietly Releasing Femtocells
Regular readers will know we keep a keen eye on Femtocells and their launch into the market place, here in the UK market up until now we have not seen much information from the main operators so it is interesting to see Vodafone making Femtocells (or Access Gateways – their product name) available from all their various sales divisions.
Reports say that so far uptake remains very low, the device has been available for over a month across all of Vodafone’s UK sales divisions, but one London store is reported to have sold only 20 units in the last three weeks. However this is probably due to a lack of serious promotion so far, this is a product the general public will need to be educated on as it is a new concept for mobile users.
In an effort to boost sales Vodafone have been offering potential users a discount on the launch price of £160, or a £30 down payment with £10 per month subscription on a 10 month contract. Consumers contacting a Vodafone call centre have been offered a Vodafone Access Gateway for a £100 one-off payment or £5 per month over two years.
Despite the poor early sales performance, the Vodafone Access Gateway has received a good response from industry and consumer gadget review writers. Setting up the Access Gateway is considered very simple, call quality was excellent, handover to the macro network worked well and Internet browsing throughput was measured at just over 3Mbits.
This feels like Vodafone are putting a ‘toe in the water’ and trying different price structures before making a formal launch of the product and service, they may also need to offer some tariff incentives to catch customers rather than just selling the units as ‘signal boosters’
Get more information over on the Vodafone website here.
Category GSM/3G | 
Author admin | 
11 August, 2009 11:22 am | 
Comments (5)
Tagged with: Access Gateway, femtocell, Vodafone
5 Comments
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Vodafone Quietly Releasing Femtocells | VoIP MoVoIP Blog — 11 August, 2009 @ 11:33 am
[...] Credit:Vodafone Quietly Releasing Femtocells [...]
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Vodafone Femtocells – New Name – New Price | IridiaBlog - VoIP, GSM and much more — 22 January, 2010 @ 11:10 am
[...] have previously discussed Vodafone’s offering here and it seems they have made some pricing changes and repositioned their product for the market [...]
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Vodafone Femtocells – New Name – New Price | VoIP MoVoIP Blog — 22 January, 2010 @ 11:39 am
[...] have previously discussed Vodafone’s offering here and it seems they have made some pricing changes and repositioned their product for the market [...]
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By Mathew Clarke, 12 August, 2009 @ 5:57 pm
Hi there,
It’s Mat from the Web Relations team at Vodafone UK.
Hope you don’t mind me posting here, just wanted to share our thoughts about a couple of the points you’ve made.
Regarding sales so far, we’ve actually been really pleased with the numbers sold, as well as the feedback we’ve received from new and existing customers – people definitely seem to like it!
I see where you’re coming from regarding lack of promotion, but the nature of the product means that it’s generally going to be of interest only to those with no or poor 3G coverage. As our 3G population coverage for the UK is over 80%, it was never going to be something that we planned to give a huge promotional push.
As for boosting sales, we’re flexible when it comes to current customers and currently treat each case on an individual basis. For new customers we offer:
-£160 one off charge
-Monthly price plans – £5 for 24 months, £7 for 18 months or £10 for 12 months.
-Offers with a handset. Visit http://www.vodafone.co.uk/gateway for more details.
-Free on certain high value price plans.
Thanks for giving me the chance to reply here and I look forward to reading your blog in the future.
All the best,
Mat Clarke
Web Relations Team
Vodafone UK
By admin, 12 August, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
Hi Mat,
Many thanks for your comments and for taking the time to post a professional reply on our blog, I think you have cleared up some of the issues we raised.
Good luck with sales !
The Iridiacom Team