Broadcom, an American company that doesn’t make wireless chips, but instead designs them and sells their blueprints to practically all the handset manufacturers, including Apple, has agreed to buy femtocell designer Percello for a cool $86 million. Femtocells, which I covered in great detail in an earlier article detailing how there are now more femtocells in America than actual cell towers, are little devices that plug into your home broadband connection and not only extend you signal, but take a load off an operator’s network.
“The femtocell market has turned the corner in 2010 with more than 1 million femtocells global shipments expected by conservative estimates this year. By 2015 we see more than 50 million femtocells being shipped annually with WCDMA femtocells making up the bulk of the market,” said Aditya Kaul, Practice Director, Mobile Networks, ABI Research. “This is driven by the consumers’ desire to be connected at all times, the need for increased data capacity in networks coupled with wireless service providers deploying fast, simple and cost-effective upgrades to support base stations and accelerate the introduction of advanced services like presence and location based alerts, multimedia syncing and sharing, smart phone applications and enhanced mobile video services to their subscribers.”
In other words, Broadcom sees that the market for femtocells is going to increase by a factor of 50 over the next 5 years and they want in on the action. There most likely customers are going to be operators who will then redistribute the devices to customers and depending on the business model they choose to implement, will either be adopted so fast that Chinese factories will not be able to keep up with the demand, or, more likely, they’ll sit in warehouses until the heads of Verizon, AT&T, what have you, realie that charging you more for service you already paid for is a bone headed idea.