Femto Forum adds new members as Mo-heads start testing… 

Femtocell industry association the Femto Forum has extended its membership to include major operators and equipment vendors that were already actively participating in the Forum’s working groups. Among the new members Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks and Telefónica O2 have been elected to the organisation’s board.

The Femto Forum announces the following new members: Alcatel-Lucent, Aricent, Azaire Networks, Bharti Airtel, Bouygues Telecom, Carphone Warehouse Networks, Celcom, Continuous Computing, General Communication Inc, Kineto Wireless, Mapesbury Communications, Mavenir Systems, MobileOne, Motorola, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks, Orascom Telecom, PCCW Mobile HK Ltd, Pirelli Broadband Solutions, Rakon, Rogers Wireless, Reef Point, Sagem Communications, SerComm, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks, Telefónica O2, Thomson, Unwired Australia, UTStarcom and ZTE Corporation. These organisations join the seven original founding members: Airvana, ip.access, NETGEAR, picoChip, RadioFrame, Tatara and Ubiquisys.

“Since the launch of the Femto Forum on July 2nd this year, the development of the femtocell industry has continued its unrelenting pace – recently seeing the first commercial deployment. The simple proposition of lower costs, for both operators and consumers, combined with improved coverage and services is proving to be compelling,” ventures Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum. “The Forum's work is now in full flow, with the major femtocell vendors and component providers actively working with operators to ensure that their products interoperate and meet the necessary demands to ensure successful widespread deployments.”

The Forum has established four working groups which address what the organisation believes are the key issues affecting the femtocell industry: regulatory; network and interoperability; radio and physical layer; and marketing and promotion.

The Forum observes that it’s been a busy summer for the femtocell community with Vodafone ceo Arun Sarin's backing the technology at his group’s Q1 trading update conference call, Sprint Nextel's AIRAVE service launch (click) and Google's investment in Ubiquisys (click). The Forum also reckons that Google’s plans for a new mobile phone operating system will result in increased data usage on handsets which, in turn, will require extra cheap capacity in the network: cue femtocells.

And in other femtocell news, new Femto Forum member Motorola has announced it has completed end-to-end testing of its 3G femtocell solution and has begun trialing its solution with a major European operator.

“Motorola is pioneering the development of femtocell solutions that play a key role in realising our vision of Seamless Mobility,” says Joe Cozzolino, corporate vice president and general manager Motorola Home & Networks Mobility EMEA. “Leveraging expertise from across the Motorola organisation, we offer a fully integrated and tested end-to-end solution, based on open standard interfaces, which includes a range of femtocell customer premises equipment (CPE) and 3G devices, a core network concentrator, systems integration services and a CPE management solution – the Motorola Netopia® Broadband Server (NBBS).”

“In Europe, 30% to 40% of the cellular traffic is generated from inside the home. Femtocells provide a more efficient way for operators to manage traffic generated indoors, compared to the outdoor macrocells of the public cellular infrastructure,” judges Vincent Poulbere, principal analyst, Ovum. “In Western Europe, we forecast that 12mn femtocells will be deployed in 2010 rising to 17mn in 2011.”
John Williamson