US Now has More Femtocells than Carrier Cell Phone Towers

Some of you may not even know what a Femtocell is.  Let me explain and explain why this is significant.

At first that may seem like a huge deal but there are currently around 256,000 cellular towers in the US compared to femtocells which now number at about 350,000. These femtocells are called different things by each carrier with Verizon going with Network Extender, AT&T choosing MicroCell, and Sprint with its Airave. The one thing these all have in common is that customers are dishing out $150+ to install and use a mini cellphone tower in your house which uses your broadband internet and your electricity bill to provide you service the carrier was supposed to offer in the first place. I simply feel like we have this equation wrong. Carriers should be paying us to install these devices!

Either way sales of femtocells is not slowing down anytime soon. Carriers are being flooded with connections that their infrastructure can barely handle. Some are turning to Wi-Fi to offload heavy data usage but all of these solutions seem like a bit of a cop out. I am truly hoping that LTE will alleviate some of these pain points but my conversations with experts in LTE do not suggest it will be any easier without a huge influx of additional frequency bandwidth for carriers.  Experts in WiMax feel strongly that it will not have problems handling the seemingly exponential demands on their networks. In fact, many WiMax experts are puzzled at the global movement and accpetance of LTE in their 4G arsenal. 

I was curious how many of you have a femtocell in your home? I've been using the Sprint Airave in my home because there are rooms that are basically wrapped in concrete and reception has always been spotty in these corners. After the Airave we all have 5 full bars of signal and better battery life.  However, we sometimes experience a delay as is common in VoIP communications.