Silicon giant Qualcomm is ramping up efforts in the heavily-hyped but still nascent femtocell (home base station) market. The company yesterday announced it has granted Global Wireless Technologies a worldwide patent license to develop and sell 3G femtocells based on WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and CDMA2000 technologies. However, according to an Unstrung report, Qualcomm isn’t prepared to only be a licensing agent for CDMA femtocells but is also developing its own 3G chipsets for femtocells, with samples expected to be delivered in the second half of 2010. The report adds that Qualcomm’s efforts will be the first to combine the femtocell radio with the baseband on its chipset, rather than having individual modules.

A new report from Juniper Research states that consumer mobile phone users’ desire for improved 3G network coverage in their homes will be the main driving force behind femtocell deployments in the next few years, with subscriptions predicted to surpass the 15 million mark worldwide during 2012. The analyst firm also predicts that revenues from new, advanced femtocell services will gain traction from 2011, and forecasts that global service revenues from femtocells will reach more than US$9 billion by 2014. However, whilst the technology behind the products seems robust, question marks remain over the business model operators should implement. To date only a handful of operators (including Sprint, Verizon and Vodafone) have commercially launched femtocells, with the majority focused on 2G technology.