Enterprise femtocells gain ground, picoChip releases platform

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Enterprise femtocells gain ground, picoChip releases platform

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 20 February, 2009

READ MORE: Femtocells | Semiconductor

As expected, femtocells achieved a high profile in Barcelona, mainly because of the rising tide of operators committing to trials and even commercial deployments. Closeness to the real world is also raising new issues and complexities, in particular, the debate over whether 'one femtocell fits all', or the nascent segment will split into different categories for residential and enterprise applications.

The market shows signs of dividing into three main types of device, on lines that echo how the Wi-Fi sector developed earlier in the decade, with products optimized for residential use - very low cost, supporting four users, usually embedded in another consumer device and backhauled by the home broadband line; enterprise use - 16 users (or even more according to Alcatel-Lucent), with more advanced support for network planning and other corporate concerns; and outdoor systems, allowing carriers to increase capacity or fill black spots with dense collections of tiny cells. These will require ruggedized formats, and a wider variety of backhaul options, including in-band options like those advocated by DesignArt.

All this is creating hot debate in the femto community - from terminology (the media has taken to the term 'super-femtocell' but the Femto Forum prefers 'enterprise femtocell') to approach. The main split is over the size of the device and the two UK-based pioneers of this base station format represent the two sides, with Ubiquisys favouring a mesh-like collection of low end femtos to achieve enterprise coverage and quality; and IP.access pushing the larger products, which it calls picocells. This term can introduce a new element of confusion since picocells have existed for years, but do not support some of the essential features of a femto, notably self-management.

But many vendors are being swayed by the arguments for an enterprise femto, particularly on the basis this would be less complex, in interference terms, than large numbers of tiny devices. picoChip, the dominant chip supplier in this market, announced its own enterprise femto reference design, which supports eight users on HSPA - complying with 3GPP Release 6 and femtocell specific features from Release 8. The main initial market for such products is likely to be shopping malls, airports and so on, which should also lead to the creation of future cells that can support multiple cellcos' networks.

Meanwhile, major players like Qualcomm are coming into the market, and the vendors are progressing towards implementing key standards such as Iuh, allowing the devices to communicate with the core in a uniform way, and to be mixed and matched.