Telecompetitor directs our attention to a study by ABI Research that indicates that femtocell shipments this year have been well, less than impressive. The technology, which creates essentially a micro-cell tower in the home, helps with coverage issues by allowing users to make calls over their home broadband connection. They're useful to carriers, in that they ease strain on local towers, but so far many operators have done a pretty poor job marketing the devices to users or offering consumer value in pricing models. For whatever reason ABI poo poo's the value issues, and instead blames the recession:It's hard to blame femtocell's slow adoption on the economy or getting the services deployed. Many carriers already offer femtocells but they only offer them to customers who call in to complain about coverage issues. And frankly some of the pricing models are just absurd; Verizon's femtocell pricing plan eats away at your wireless minutes even tough you're making the wireless call over your own broadband connection. Again, where's the value?

ABI predicts things could improve slightly in 2010 for the well-hyped technology, but that shipments will still be 40% lower than earlier predictions. That of course means a shake out among smaller femtocell vendors who actually listened to firms like ABI back in 2006 when they declared femtocells would be the hottest thing in telecom since the Hayes compatible.