Carriers driving femto fever

Talk of femtocell technology is high on the agenda at Mobile World Congress taking place in Barcelona this week. Following on from the launch of an initiative to harmonise the integration of femtocells into mobile core networks, the operator community is starting to take a real interest the deployment of femtos as a risk less strategy for network upgrades.

Speaking to telecoms.com at the show, Femto Forum chairman, Simon Saunders, said that with the strong growth in data services that operators are experiencing, on of the biggest concerns the carriers have at present is knowing where to spend money to support this data growth.

"There has been a certain hesitancy among the operators to spend on network upgrades because there is no available capex for big rollouts," Saunders said. "Femtocells effectively de-risk the upgrade, they are low cost and they can be deployed where the data growth is strongest."

The Forum said that the growing interest in femto technology has fostered an environment in which there are many different, and sometimes proprietary, methods of integrating many different types of femtocell. And while this is not holding up the commercial deployment of femtocells, the recently announced initiative aims unite these different approaches in the longer term and set the stage for the development of future standards.

Saunders said that the Forum has established 12 technology architectures for the integration of femtos into the core network and he revealed that in a few weeks he expects the 3GPP study to become a work item, pushing forward femto standardisation.

"We are moving on from technical trials to user experience trials," he said, "commercial deployments are expected in 2009."

On Monday, UK carrier O2 revealed that it is trialling Japanese kit vendor NEC's femtocell technology, with an eye to launching a consumer offering next year.

Saunders said that the input of the operator community is of great importance to the standardisation of the technology platform. "The number of operator members [in the Forum] is increasing and we aim to get a 50/50 split between vendor and carrier members," Saunders said. "The operators are there to make sure the initiative is being taken seriously and to drive it forward," he said.

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