A femtocell business model: The BeFEMTO view

In this paper we describe the BeFEMTO view about femtocell business model. Even if from the technological perspective, the benefits provided by the femtocell technology are clear to operators, the economic impact of this technology is still an open issue. Operators are expected to reduce their Capital and Operational Expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX), since a large amount of traffic can be offloaded from the macro to the femto network. Self-organization capabilities which will be embedded in femto networks will allow further reductions in OPEX. The satisfaction of users to be served by the femto technology will result in additional income derived from reduction in churning rate and from additional users churning from other operators. However, the competition with ubiquitous Wi-Fi technology, is an open issue. Will the costumers be willing to pay for femtocells? Assuming that they are not, since they already have Wi-Fi at home, the operators have to face huge investments to aggressively price femtocells. We discuss in this paper the BeFEMTO project view on these open issues.