SFR launches femtocells in France

French operator SFR became the second European carrier to commercially introduce femtocells this week, following Vodafone’s UK launch in July.

The service is called SFR Home 3G and the operator is targeting customers with indoor coverage issues. The offering is based on units built by Ubiquisys, which in turn are designed around the Kineto Wireless femtocell network gateway.

SFR’s femtocell costs €199 and works with any ADSL connection.

In related news, equipment manufacturer Airvana is extolling the virtues of the femtocell after claiming to have identified a significant mobile network “load multiplier effect” caused by smartphone data traffic on the macro cellular network.

Airvana found that for a given volume of data transmitted, one smartphone typically generates eight times the network signalling load of a laptop equipped with a dongle or USB modem. Smartphones may only account for a minority percentage of all devices on operator networks, but they are always on, moving between cell sites and continually polling the network, with Airvana revealing that smartphones are already responsible for the majority of the total signalling activity on mobile networks.