Vodafone Femtocells – New Name – New Price

We talk a lot about Femtocells as we are interested to see how they develop in the market place and how network providers can use them to their benefit and ultimately for the benefit of their customers.

We have previously discussed Vodafone’s offering  here and it seems they have made some pricing changes and repositioned their product for the market place.

Vodafone has recently relaunched their Femtocell with a large price cut from £160 down to £50. It has also launched a marketing campaign aimed at educating the consumer as to the benefits of the device and at the same time renamed the unit from being the ‘Vodafone Home Gateway’ to ‘Sure Signal’.

Vodafone have not commented on the reason for this new Femtocell enthusiasm, but we have seen reports that make mention of Vodafone’s recent launch of the iPhone and as we know from O2′s experience, this device places high data demand on the network so maybe this is Vodafone’s way to try to offload some of that data traffic onto the Femtocell.

As always we watch this new launch with interest.

More information from the Vodafone site here

Carriers Split over Skype Capability of New Nokia Handset

It seems that Nokia have caused a storm with some carriers over their plans to integrate Skype in all its new N series handsets. Some carriers are concerned about potential lost revenue from cheap calls made through Skype, as well as Nokia’s perceived attempt to own the customer.
 
According to Mobile Today, an ‘operator source’ said it was another example of Nokia trying to build an ecosystem that’s all about Nokia and reducing the operator to a ‘dumb pipe’.
 
Nokia’s Skype plans have split the operators – T-Mobile and 3 support it, while O2 and Orange have vented their anger at the plans in high-level group discussions. They’re pretty against it, basically
 
So much so that O2 and Orange may both refuse to carry the N97, due for a June launch

We always like to see how the carriers opinions change as T-Mobile was rumoured in the past to have blocked VoIP traffic on their network.

More information on the story here