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Developing our membership
In the past two years the Forum has gone from strength to strength and
its membership now reads like a who's who of the mobile industry.
However, it is rapidly becoming apparent that this is in itself not
sufficient - the impact of femtocells is set to have ramifications
beyond the relatively narrow telecoms community into the wider
technological space.
As such it is important that we continue to expand
the ecosystem in an inclusive and progressive way, mirroring the
evolution of the industry itself.
Recently there has been an
increasing diversification of the membership with the addition of
leading consumer electronics companies. These include the likes of
Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba who raise the interesting prospect of
femtocells being placed at the centre of the home network, allowing
interaction between a consumer's electronic devices and the mobile
phone network.
Building on the crucial work that's currently
being undertaken by the services SIG, the next expansion efforts will
be directed towards increasing membership among the application
developer community.
At the Femtocell World Summit in June, a number of
vendors demonstrated a range of femto services to a group of developer
guests which included dynamic user interfaces, remote control of home
entertainment equipment and presence triggered alerts and messages.
Developer members will be crucial in order to ensure that the full
potential of femto applications is achieved.
Also in this issue:
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Interference and the business case
The
femtocell market moves at such a relentless pace that one can be
forgiven for finding it all a little confusing. This has never been
truer than today when certain issues, like interference and the
business case, are occasionally described as barriers to entry, yet
deployments continue regardless. It therefore seems appropriate to
revisit these areas to discover exactly what is going on.
Ever
since the appearance of the early femtocell prototypes a few years ago,
the interference challenge has frequently been raised as a key issue.
Put simply, operators will not deploy femtocells if they interfere with
the macro network. The reality is femtocells most certainly do
interfere with the surrounding network unless preventative measures are
taken - the question is do these work?
The Femto Forum
undertook the most intensive survey ever conducted into the area and
found a series of methods - including adaptive pilot power control and
dynamic receiver gain management amongst others - do successfully
mitigate the issue. Furthermore, the outcome of this careful
interference management is the opportunity to dramatically enhance both
the capacity and service quality of the network for both the femtocell
and macrocell users. However, one could be forgiven for questioning
whether such techniques have really proven themselves in the field.
Fortunately,
we are now in a position to comprehensively answer this question.
Femtocells have been commercially deployed in metropolitan and rural
environments in Asia, the US and most recently the UK. Interference and
business case The result is a resounding success as interference with
the macro network is not proving to be an issue. It seems that what was
once a major challenge has now been overcome.
The other
challenge frequently associated with femtocells is whether there is an
operator business case. The Femto Forum commissioned detailed research
by leading independent consultancy Signals Research Group into this
area, which found that femtocells can generate attractive returns
for operators by significantly increasing the expected lifetime value
of a subscriber across a wide range of user scenarios.
Flexible consumer offers
Evidently
numerous operators are confident in the business model with the three
largest US operators all rolling out femtocells as well as industry
giant Vodafone and several Asian players. The flexibility of the
business model has also been borne out by the variation in consumer
propositions. Femtocells are not even close to approaching volume
production yet some operators are providing them to consumers for free,
while others are offering them for a single one off cost or a monthly
charge. It is clear that viable business models have already been
developed and it is only going to get easier from now on as standards
and wider product choice support operator deployments.
So why
has the debate surrounding the business case and interference
continued? It seems that this is just a byproduct of a fast moving
market. Understanding of the best-practice techniques for interference
management has spread, supported by both deployments and standards.
Equally, any undeployed new technology is victim to business case
concerns because so much is unclear and speculative. However, over the
last six months we've seen the earliest deployments mature and new
operators enter the fray which are in turn bringing further clarity.
It's taking a while for the whole industry to digest the new
information coming in, but make no mistake it is positive.
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