Femtocells have grown up and left home, according to ip.access founder and CTO Nick Johnson, commenting on the news Wednesday that the Femto Forum had rebranded as the Small Cell Forum. Johnson was unveiling the firm’s first 4G small cell – an event that highlights the growing maturing of the sector – yet brings with it some interesting network planning considerations.

The Femto Forum has rebranded as the Small Cell Forum, signaling its coming of age and evolving from its established home environment to enterprise, public, metro and even rural locations. But are small cells going to be bigger than femtocells?

Small cells promise to boost capacity and throughput in areas of high usage more cheaply than macro cell deployments, while allowing more efficient use of spectrum than macros, and providing improved coverage at the cell edge and indoors. Bringing the radio signal closer to the user should also help to improve device battery life.

With mobile data traffic expected to double annually, small cell base stations are set to play an important role in expanding the capacity of wireless networks. Mobile operators are realizing that to meet the demands for data, video and application access caused by smart phones and other devices, there is a real beauty to going small.

Ubiquisys, the femtocell vendor, has announced a partnership with chip manufacturer Intel to develop a new range of intelligent small cell base stations. The devices will feature Ubiquisys application software and will be powered by Intel architecture.

With 18 operators now having deployed more than 1.7 million femtocells, the baby of the infrastructure sectors is finding its feet. And like all babies, it’s ready to grow, as it looks to move away from its original model of miniaturisation.

Femtocell deployments may have doubled to 19 since last year’s Mobile World Congress but the news that seems to be causing the most excitement among members of the Femto Forum is the growth in enterprise interest in the technology. “Last year, all commercial femtocell deployments were residential, now more than a third are enterprise-focused,” said Femto Forum Chairman Simon Saunders, adding that commitments to launch the technology have tripled to 34 in the past year.

London and Tokyo, January 18, 2011 – NEC Corporation (NEC) announced today that it will attend the Mobile World Congress 2011 at the Fira de Barcelona, Barcelona February 14 – 17, 2011. This year, NEC will showcase a range of innovative and revenue-generating solutions for mobile operators at Stand No 8A125, Hall 8 including quick-to-market cloud services and next-generation mobile broadband solutions: LTE, backhaul, femtocell and Operational Support Systems (OSS).

US silicon vendor Broadcom has revealed its second major acquisition of the month with the announcement that it has signed a deal to buy femtocell chip developer Percello Ltd for $86m. The deal comes two weeks after Broadcom acquired multimode 4G platform developer Beceem.