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New book on femtocells published
An authoritative new book on femtocells "Femtocells: Opportunities and
Challenges for Business and Technology" has just been published by
Wiley. Edited by Femto Forum chairman Simon Saunders with several
expert co-authors, it covers business, technology and regulatory
aspects, including an overview of femtocell standards for UMTS, LTE,
CDMA and WiMAX. Details are at www.femtocellbook.com
Awards
shortlist
At this year’s Femtocells World Summit we will be announcing the
winners of the first annual Femto Forum Awards, which recognize
outstanding achievements within the femtocell industry. The awards were
open to the whole industry and are being judged independently of the
Forum by a panel of distinguished analysts, journalists and industry
experts, chaired by Professor William Webb, Head of R&D at Ofcom.
We are very pleased to see a large number of very strong entries across
all the categories for these inaugural awards, which attracted more
than 70 entries from companies around the world and across the mobile
value chain.
The finalists were announced on the 18th May and the full shortlist can
be found online HERE.
The winners will be announced at a gala awards dinner on 24th June 2009
at Femtocells World Summit in London.
For more information on the Femtocell Industry Awards, click HERE.
To register for the dinner, click HERE.
New members
The membership of the Forum has continued to grow over the past
quarter, adding a number of telecoms giants such as Cable&Wireless
and Qualcomm. Illustrating a wider consumer electronics industry
interest in the potential for femtocells and related services, market
leaders Sony Corporation, Sumitomo and Toshiba recently joined. The
total membership now stands at 116 (including 50 operators) with
operators accounting for over 1.3 billion mobile users and
the wide range of input and opinions provided by the membership is
helping to drive the industry forward apace.
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Progress on LTE and WiMAX femtos
The past couple of months have seen the inclusion of LTE femtocells in
3GPP’s release 8 as well as an initiative
between the Femto Forum and the WiMAX Forum to jointly develop
specifications for WiMAX femtocells.
There is growing evidence that traditional mobile network architecture
is approaching the theoretical maximum information transfer rate
(Shannon’s limit) and further improvements will only be possible by
rolling out more, smaller cells – essentially femtocells. In fact, an
analysis of Cooper’s law (the inventor of the mobile phone) - which
holds that wireless capacity doubles every 30 months – shows that the
dominant factor in improvements to date has been the use of smaller
cells as opposed to other methods such as revised modulation
techniques, better coding or the use of more frequencies.
The principal performance benefit femtocells bring to both WiMAX and
LTE is that they will ensure more users receive peak data rates more of
the time - especially inside buildings where the vast majority of
mobile broadband data is consumed and where the service quality is
lower than outside. Femtocells achieve this by maximising spectrum
re-use and by ensuring power, and therefore network capacity, is not
wasted by trying to penetrate buildings.
Femtocells present several key benefits to operators. As in 3G
networks femtocells can considerably lower the delivery cost per bit
through significant savings in cell site installation, maintenance and
backhaul costs. However, operators can also use femtocells to lower the
cost, and therefore the risk, of rollout by adopting a different
strategy to that employed in 2G and 3G networks.
Although traditional macro base stations will still be essential to
provide widespread outdoor coverage, operators can use both indoor and
outdoor femtocells from the outset to carry substantial amounts of data
traffic, thereby realising major savings on backhaul and other
associated capacity costs.
Combining femtocells and macrocells in this way allows operators to
build their next generation networks incrementally in line with demand
and avoid the need to second guess user uptake.
Upcoming events
Click HERE for more
information and member discount rates
June
14-18
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IEEE International
Conference on Communications
|
Dresden
|
23-25
June
|
Femtocells
World Summit
|
London
|
8-9 September
|
LTE Asia
|
Hong Kong
|
15 October
|
Femtocell
Symposium
|
Beijing
|
| 21-22 October |
The
ATIS Technology Conference @ Supercomm 2009 |
Chicago |
4-5 November
|
LTE Americas |
Dallas
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16-18 November
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Femtocell,
Americas
|
San Diego
|
Future Plenaries
2009
|
22-25
September
|
10th Plenary
|
Lisbon
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18-20
November
|
11th Plenary
|
San Diego
|
2010
|
10-12 March
|
12th Plenary
|
Asia
|
11-14 May
|
13th Plenary
|
United States
|
21-24
September
|
14th Plenary
|
Europe
|
8-10 December
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15th Plenary
|
United States
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