In this paper, we propose the group-based time control mechanism to improve the network overload and delay performance in the femtocell-based machine type communications (MTC) networks. The MTC network may be congested if numerous MTC devices concurrently deliver messages to the MTC server. Femtocells can solve the radio access network (RAN) congestion, however the core network (CN) congestion becomes more difficult to handle. The proposed group-based time control method can spread the traffic load of MTC devices over the time, and thereby mitigate the RAN overload and CN overload simultaneously. Numerical results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the network congestion and message delay compared to the existing methods.