25 Nov 2008

The hidden benefits of femtocells

I have spent some time now looking at various femtocell business cases and find it very interesting how creative some of the operators are when it comes to using femtocells to generate new revenue streams.

It occured to me that sometimes it's the straightforward and simple things that get over looked in these business cases, and I wanted to go back to basics and look at the simplest scenario of using a femtocell to generate revenue.

One of the revenue streams that operators rely on is the income from call termination charges. All operators negotaite commerical wholesale interconnection agreements with other operators, these are often wholesale agreements regulating the conditions under which the agreement parties can connect to each other.

The call termination rate is a wholesale price one network pays in order to terminate a call originating from its own network to a destination in the other network. Typically, the call termination rates are based on an average cost of delivery plus a margin.

With the increased regulatory pressure to reduce call termination rates (e.g. in UK and Europe) operators are having to drop their margins and have to live on a smaller revenue stream from terminating calls from other networks. Changes to termination rates is having a significant impact on the profits of mobile telecoms companies.

The average cost of delivering mobile terminated calls is greatly reduced if the penetration of femtocells in the network is high enough. And therefore it becomes cheaper -on average - to terminate calls from other networks. This automatically translates into higher call termination profits.

No comments: