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Femtozone report (CES,
MWC, CTIA)
The Femtozone - which first
appeared at Mobile World Congress 2009 -
returned with a vengeance in 2010 featuring at the big three shows
– the Consumer Electronics Show, Mobile World Congress and
CTIA
Wireless.
If you’re not aware of the Femtozone, it served as the
one-stop-shop for event visitors interested in learning about the
latest developments in the femtocell industry. It featured a daily
schedule of public presentations from the leading operators in the
space. This included large organisations such as AT&T, regional
representation from the likes of US Cellcom, as well as medium sized
alternatives such as Portugal’s OPTIMUS. They were joined by
all
the leading vendors, top-tier analysts and other industry bodies such
as the UK regulator OFCOM. The focus was on the principal opportunities
and challenges facing the femtocell market. The Femtozone also
showcased a wide variety of femtocell products and featured public
demonstrations of devices and applications in action.
It also served as the venue for Femto Forum press conferences at each
of the shows which drew top tier business press such as Reuters and the
Financial Times as well as the full gamut of top mobile and technology
focused media. Evidently femtocells were the hot topic at the events.
Such was the success of the events that we’re already
planning
the Femtozone 2011 series. If you’d like to participate
don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here.
Also in this issue:
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Report on Singapore plenary
The great and the good from the femtocell community congregated in
Singapore in March for the Femto Forum’s plenary. We took a
peek
inside some of the meetings to give you a taste of what the Forum is
getting up to.
The LTE Special Interest Group (SIG) was a hive of activity ahead of
the Forum’s announcement of the completion of research into
the
impact of femtocells on LTE. With femtocells being retrofitted into 3G
networks, the opportunity to employ LTE femtocells from the start
offers tantalizing benefits in terms of improving the business case,
rollout possibilities and the user experience. The group also made
headway on work around the LTE femtocell architecture and API
standardisation which will be fed into bodies like 3GPP.
The Radio & Physical Layer Group (WG2) were busy looking into
managing interference between Wi-Fi and femtocells as well as looking
at maximising cellular performance in close knit networks of femtocells
in enterprises.
Meanwhile, the Services Special Interest Group - which focuses on
agreeing a common approach to the development of homezone and office
femtocell applications – crystallised its 2010 plan. This
involves
prioritising control of femtocell services on the network rather than
the handset. It also includes focusing effort on the GSMA's OneAPI
framework to enable the creation of applications and content that is
portable across mobile operators. While femtocell applications to date
have focused on consumers, the group also decided to prioritise the
definition of an IP PBX femtocell application to help drive the
enterprise applications space.
The marketing working group finalised its cooperative work with Signal
Research Group on the business case for femtocells in the mobile
broadband era – which was subsequently published at CTIA
Wireless
– as well as concluding much of its work around LTE which
will be
published in May. The
group has also started work on a paper explaining the role of
femtocells in data offload and separately is concluding a topic-brief
looking at the timing and synchronisation challenge in femtocells.
Finally, following the success of the Femtozone at CES, MWC and CTIA it
was agreed to rollout the programme again in 2011.
All eyes are now turned to the UK where the next plenary will be taking
place in June in Reading.
Conference report
For a post event summary on Avren's Femtocells Asia 2010 (March 8th-9th, Singapore), click here.
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