Deployment of Femtocells in Pakistan: A Consumer's Perspective

摘要

Femtocell base stations operate in the licensed cellular band, and are small and low power devices providing a feasible and low cost alternative to microcell deployment in order to improve indoor signal coverage at homes and small buildings. Despite many benefits that can be offered by wide scale femtocell deployment by network operators, there are some mandatory factors related to the end user perception in adopting and paying for the technology. In this paper, a thorough survey has been conducted to get an idea about the end user perspectives in regard to the deployment of femtocells. The survey contains a number of questions asked from over 150 participants from different backgrounds in order to determine the user opinion on installing femtocells and opting for data services offered by cellular network operators. Different categories have been made from the survey questions and results obtained are presented and discussed. Although the survey has been conducted in urban and rural areas of Pakistan, the survey can prove to be valuable in assisting network operators to adopt better marketing strategies outside Pakistan as well. Based on the general user response, it is evident that the users showed their interest in utilizing femtocells if better and low cost packages for using data services are provided. Furthermore, in those areas where DSL connectivity options are not available, users are willing to pay for femtocell base stations that can connect them to the cellular network via the microcell base station.