Half of all femtocell security gateway revenue will come from enterprise by 2016

LONDON, UK: Consumer femtocells are expected to account for the bulk of the market. But in the femtocell core network, enterprise will play a bigger role, according to a new study from ABI Research. Femtocell core networks are based on user capacity rather than access point deployments, and the number of enterprise femtocell users is expected to be far greater than consumer femtocell users.

Aditya Kaul, practice director, mobile networks, says: “While the femtocell access point vendors are concentrating on the consumer femtocell market (driven by access point volumes), the femtocell gateway vendors need to focus on the enterprise market. They should consider building partnerships that focus on that segment and allow them to tune and enhance their products’ capabilities for the enterprise.”

Of the current 70+ contracts, ABI Research has counted at least 15 pure enterprise femtocell contracts, with 25 contracts being a mix of residential and enterprise femtocells. Enterprise femtos are to make up 36 percent of shipments by 2016, which relates to 50 percent of security gateway revenues.

Those revenues will be garnered by Genband, Acme Packet, Stoke, Intellinet, Huawei, Alcatel Lucent, Cisco and other key security gateway vendors who make up the market. Some of the larger end-to-end femto suppliers are starting to consider partnering for security gateways. This is beneficial for independent vendors such as Genband, Acme Packet, Stoke and IntelliNet.