A study of multimedia service delivery in the home for femtocells

Abstract

This thesis considers the case of Ubiquisys Ltd., a femtocell company, and the ability for its products to provide added services to users in the home. The findings include recommendations for software applications, application delivery, timing, and pricing. The actions that should be taken as a result of this study include a few things in both application architecture as well as long-term strategy. First, the femtocell needs to allow communication between the smartphone, the home network, and other smart devices. Secondly, the femtocell has no self-contained interface to the user, and thus will require platform specific applications sold through the smartphone OS or handset vendor. Lastly, Ubiquisys needs to decide on a strategy, including both place and timing, for rolling out services. Femtocell applications require femtocells, which in the next few years will only reach an installed base several orders of magnitude smaller than the smartphone. It is recommended that mobile advertising based free applications should be provided initially while slowly phasing in paid applications in 2011 and 2012. Through application of system architecture analysis and Design Structure Matrices (DSM) to the current and emerging architectures, this paper provides a template for analyzing ecosystems for home cloud services and content delivery. This is achieved through an in depth analysis of two current product architectures. Information drawn from analysis of these systems is then used to make conclusions and recommendations about how a femtocell can provide the greatest value in the home.