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The two leading US mobile carriers plan to have their first femtocells deployed within a year, not just to boost coverage but to support their nascent moves into a wide range of consumer electronics devices, looking well beyond handset services alone.

Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility both put some flesh on their previously announced femtocell plans this week, though they have some significant differences of emphasis. Verizon's CTO Dick Lynch, speaking at Cisco's C-Scape conference, was focusing on femtos as a way to support early stage LTE roll-out at relatively low cost and risk, while AT&T's John Stankey, head of operations, told a UBS conference that the company would be focusing mainly on improving 3G coverage and supporting fixed/mobile convergence via home gateways.

These gateways integrate other capabilities like Wi-Fi and/or DSL in a single box along with the femtocell - a tiny cellular base station backhauled by the consumer's broadband line, often installed to improve indoor coverage or support homezone services. Such devices represent an opportunity for Verizon and AT&T to follow through on recently articulated plans to extend their customer control by offering consistent services across a wide range of consumer electronics gear. In October, AT&T set up a dedicated Emerging Devices division to bring web-enabled products and services to a wider range of platforms, and Verizon said it "wanted to be more powerful in Best Buy".

Lynch said femtocells will start to be deployed shortly after the carrier's first roll-out of LTE base stations in a few key urban areas, using its recently acquired 700MHz spectrum. Its aggressive deadline for this is before year-end in 2009 and the femtos will support integration with Wi-Fi and home networks. They are often used to improve indoor penetration, but in its low frequency band, Verizon will face different challenges, notably urban interference. The carrier is also expected to launch CDMA femtocells, possibly using the Samsung product already in use at Sprint, in the first half of next year.

Over at AT&T, Stankey said W-CDMA femtocells are being "validated" with customers and "we expect that we will be into a broader scale metropolitan deployment the second quarter of next year". AT&T has been working with Cisco and its partner ip.access, and is expected to launch an integrated home gateway. Stankey hinted at a "media device that is used for storing content or distributing content. We would like to get to a gateway device that optimizes the home network" - and claimed the operators' target price of $100 is "very very doable in that environment", at least once the market reaches volume. AT&T is targeting a total cost of under $500 for all the customer premises equipment it supplies to a home in future.

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