Everyone makes a profit, and performance is best in class
Ubiquisys has said that it can profitably support the production of sub-$100 femtocells. Ubiquisys announced this week that SerComms’s G3-mini is the first example of a “new generation of low-cost femtocells” that can come in at under the $100 mark.
One competitor had questioned how Ubiquisys can support that number profitably. “I thought it was a strange thing to announce,” the industry player said to Mobile Europe. “Is it achievable, can anyone make money at that price today? It’s not enough to stay in business at today’s volumes.”
But Keith Day, VP Marketing Ubiquisys, said that the company’s hardware and software designs can support manufacturers in the profitale production of femtocells that fall “well within” the $100 mark without compromising performance.
He added that the number has been reached without factoring in massive volume production. The first order to attain that sub $100 mark was for 100,000 units, he said.
“We make healthy margins at below $100. We are a small UK company that does nothing other than make femtocells. We have to answer to our shareholders and be sustainable. In fact, we deliberately waited to talk about this because we didn’t want it to appear as just a publicity stunt before we started to implement it with manufacturers, get a robust product, and get orders.”
“How do we do it? The process is fairly clear. We have encapsulated the radio bit and a lot of femto deployment expertise into our Femtocell Engine software. By doing that we can help manufacturers deliver femtocells without the need for them to have 3G radio or software expertise,” Day said. “They can also benefit from efficiencies of production through our customizable hardware designs.”
Day added that performance need not be affected. Some competitors have proposed that cheaper products can be produced with less sophisticated RF designs, where operators can deploy femotcells in a sole carrier. But Day insisted that the Ubiquisys femtocell has been designed “from the outset” for use in shared carriers.
“I see people writing things like that on blogs and articles and it makes me want to jump in… We think the G3 mini is best in class. It is eight calls and has real time continuous self-organisation,” Day said.
One industry source also raised the issue of whether the sub-$100 selling price includes IPR licenses due to the likes of Qualcomm and Ericsson.
Day said, “That’s a more complicated question to answer. The answer is, it depends. The IPR is given to whoever’s brand is on the femtocell, which is sometimes our name and sometimes not. But IPRs wouldn’t put our femtocell over that $100 mark in any case.”