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This week saw the femtocell finally crossing the chasm from interesting trials to commercial operator plans, with Japan's Softbank becoming the first cellco to announce firm plans for full scale roll-out of the tiny base stations. The carrier has signed a contract with NEC, whose gateway products incorporate femtocells from UK specialist Ubiquisys.

Some carriers are looking to femtocells for fairly basic advantages such as improved indoor coverage - the main motive behind Sprint's Airave, which arguably is really the world's first commercial femto service, though the Samsung CDMA device does not support most of the standards and features that will come to define a femtocell. But we can expect to see far more creative approaches from Softbank, which will want to use femtos to support in-home convergence and deliver highly differentiated mobile web services in its competitive market.

SFR, Vodafone's French joint venture, is also highly advanced with 3G femto trials, and had been tipped to get out of the commercial gate first, but will certainly not beat Softbank now, if the Japanese cellco meets its own target of a January 2009 launch of femto-based services in urban centers. Even if the roll-out slips by a couple of months, it is an important milestone for 3G femtocells in general, as the technology hovers on the brink of standardization and mainstream acceptance.

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