Telecom liberalization: now with femtocells, postponed (March 8, 2008)

While December 2007 have passed with a question in the air on “will 2008 be a year of the femtocell?”, it is still too early to say about the market disruption for MOs and NEPs. Telco 2.0 reminds us in this context of the 2006 partial acquisition of Spring Mobil, a Swedish innovative femtocell production company, by Tele2. This definitely will be the MOs strategy in the first time of the femtocell existence. By the way, this is what Cisco does to any promising network-related Silicon Valley’s startup: acquires it.

However, telecom market liberalization (and this is exactly what happens when a company may enter a MVNO world for mere €10‒20K) which will happen in the real year of femtocell (this will be no earlier than 2009) will rise a much wider need in the standardized service execution environment. Open source SLEEs (think of Mobicents), as well as commercial ones promise to be in the high demand in this situation.

And while “Telco 2.0” has already become a common buzzword, this situation with the market liberalization which now only promises to appear will be for telecom world the point when it will start to accumulate products and services quantity. It will take several more years for this quantity turn into quality — just in the same way, as quantity of web application has lead to a qualitative change in the Internet world (we all here know the buzzword for this change).

However, the in this case the future seems even more bright than before.