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| Femtocells: mass productions |
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| Thursday, 17 July 2008 | |
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Trade body adopts key management standard for volume market as analyst questions longer term case for use of existing handsets…
Members of the femtocell trade body the Femto Forum have agreed to implement the Broadband Forum's TR-069 ‘CPE WAN Management Protocol’, a worldwide standard for real-time management of customer premises equipment (CPE), as the basis for the management protocol for femtocells. The Forum states that management and provisioning of very high volumes of femtocells has been a major concern for carriers, and that adopting TR-069 and being able to re-use all the proven experience of that standard will enable femtocells to be easily deployed and configured reliably, and in high volume. The organisation explains that unlike traditional cellular equipment, femtocells will be deployed in high volumes and installed by the subscriber, so the provisioning and configuration must be completely automated and managed remotely by the mobile operator. The Forum maintains that the TR-069 standard has proven that it allows operators to offer simple installation and provisioning; perform advanced diagnostics and conduct remote firmware and service upgrades with millions of end devices, in an extremely cost-effective manner. Moreover use of the standard should eliminate the need for operators to send technical personnel on-site, a mechanism that will be unfeasible given millions of units that are set to be rolled out if the femto business flies. The Femto Forum and the Broadband Forum say they plan to continue working closely together to define extensions to TR-069 to add additional femtocell capability to the standard. “The remote management of consumer equipment like femtocell access points is a vital tool for operators to introduce new revenue-generating services and to consistently provide a high level of service,” offers Femto Forum chairman Simon Saunders. “Femtocells are sophisticated pieces of telecommunications equipment, but they are also first and foremost consumer devices and as such they have to be simple enough to be installed and used by the average consumer. Many people have been concerned about the scalability of provisioning and management for femtocells: with this initiative that concern is addressed.” Handset mindset Meantime, though, while accepting the need for and applauding such initiatives as the adoption of TR-069 as the femtocell industry starts to crank up activity, one analyst house is questioning whether the central marketing proposition that femtocells can work with normal 3G handsets will hold true over time. The recent Disruptive Analysis report ‘Femtocell-aware Bubley also notes that the medium-term hopes of the industry are that people will use their cellphones differently when in range of femtos. “There will be different applications and different behavioural patterns when people are at home – perhaps content backups, podcasts or even advertiser-sponsored TV programming. The mobile phone may need to linked to TV, PC, HiFi or other items of domestic technology,” he contends on his blog. The Disruptive Analysis report argues that if the phone will be used differently, it needs to be designed differently as well. It points out that standard phones can work with femtocells, but they are not optimised. For example, certain applications may only work when the phone is within femto range – but they need to know when that is. “Yes, some services can be notified by the core network that the user is ‘at home’, but that approach doesn’t scale to a wide base of operators, application developers and handset/OS vendors,” writes Bubley. “The phone needs to be ‘aware’ of the femtocell, ideally both in the radio and the application platform. Elements like the IP networking ‘connection manager’ in the phone are key. Other aspects like memory allocation and power management may need to be revisited too - even perhaps the physical design of the device.” “Changing such elements is not quick,” cautions Bubley. “The handset industry is much more complex and slow-moving than many in the wider wireless business understand. The mobile industry habitually trips up on these issues.” John Williamson |
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