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I reported last September the strategic decision had been made and they achieved the $50 price they were demanding. They now are comfortable beginning the rollout, although I expect a slow start. They will probably begin, like Vodafone, by providing them to customers who are having trouble with their mobile dropping calls at home. Femtocells have a huge advantage over WiFi UMA because they lock the mobile customer into their network. Several analysts at BBWF suggested that WiFi phones will win out over femtos, but a large European carrier tells me otherwise. They like the lock-in, as well as the ability of a femto to work without a special power-hungry WiFi phone. I had the chance to ask Ivan Seidenberg about Verizon's femto plans as well. He carefully didn't say anything beyond “our trial is very interesting” but I believe the big smile on his face reflects Verizon's enthusiasm as well.

I've previously reported that AT&T has made the strategic decision to deploy 5-10M femtos for a cloud across the United States, potentially doubling their effective spectrum. They are still not satisfied the technology works well enough, however, with interference issues remaining hard to solve in dense areas. I had the chance at the CITI anniversary event to ask Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon about femtos, and his eyes lit up at the opportunity. He wouldn't say anything beyond "our trials are very interesting,"

"The reality is that it is only government permission to use spectrum (licenses) that is scarce. Spectrum capacity itself is abundant. Indeed, while actual spectrum measurement studies are difficult to find, those in the public domain have demonstrated that even in the so-called “beachfront” frequencies below 3 GHz, the vast majority of frequency bands are not being used in most locations and at most times.
The gross underutilization of the nation’s spectrum resource should be an urgent concern for national broadband policy. Spectrum is not only an immensely valuable and publicly-owned resource, but one that is infinitely renewable: every millisecond that a frequency band is not used for communication, that capacity is wasted forever. ...

Mark McHenry, a former manager of DARPA’s NeXt Generation spectrum program, found that even in Manhattan and in Washington D.C. near the White House, less than 20 percent of the frequency bands below 3 GHz were in use over the course of a business day. McHenry’s NSF study demonstrated in a mix of urban, suburban and exurban areas that the vast majority of the most valuable spectrum bands are vacant or unused for the majority of the time. The highest occupancy rate on the prime beachfront spectrum below 3 GHz was just 13 percent in New York City, while the average across locations studied was just 6 percent. Across the country, this underutilized spectrum represents an enormous untapped capacity for broadband; particularly in rural areas where average usage of “beachfront” spectrum is in the low single digits.”

NAF also provided suggestions for creating maps of spectrum that could be dynamically changed and checked in real time by devices wanting to transmit. Michael Calabrese and Sascha Meinrath are doing important work, joined at this session by Kevin Werbach and Michael Marcus. http://bit.ly/VBr5x

Wireless towers and backhaul for unserved areas is by far the best way to bring megabits and should be the #1 or #2 priority for any stimulus spending. For voice, a 1.5 megabit T-1 could carry dozens of calls for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars/month. Renting a T-1 from the telco involved much less upfront cost than adding your own backhaul. But data requires megabits to several customers at once, and needs far more bandwidth.

New cells sites for the LTE/WiMAX generation usually are provisioned with 40 to 100 megabits to begin with, brutally expensive with T-1's. Microwave wireless backhaul is usually far cheaper than fiber, unless you can't get line of sight or are the incumbent telco with facilities in place. Even for incumbents, running new fiber can be very expensive. Verizon Wireless runs fiber to every LTE base station site that it can in the urban markets but often chooses microwave radios in the rural and suburban markets.

Wireless radios to backhaul 8 megabits from an Indian cellsite can cost as little as $2,000 a link. For developed world requirements. Earl Lum of EJL Wireless Research tells me $8,000 to $25,000 is the right budget, depending on capacity and distance. The lower priced units will often be fine. That will provide radios for backhauling up to 155 megabits (OC-3) with minimal ongoning costs. A full gigabit Ethernet microwave radio link currently costs about $35,000 in small quantities because demand is limited and that requires using higher frequencies in the E-Band spectrum. He predicts that will be down under $10,000 a link in a few years.

You nearly always can provide line of sight for less than the cost of running new fiber.