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
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, VoIP | 
Author admin | 
22 January, 2010 11:09 am | 
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