• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

Standards for femtocells continue to progress at a lightning pace, at least in wireless industry terms. Specifications submitted by the Femto Forum last year in the areas of management and network integration have been incorporated into standards published today by two key bodies, the 3GPP and Broadband Forum.

The dual action by these two bodies shows the importance of femtocells in fixed/mobile convergence business models and in home networks. The new standards for operations, administration and management (OA&M) are based on original requirements developed within the Femto Forum. They define workings for plug and play provisioning, fault management and performance management. All of these have been important issues for operators that are interested in the potential of femtocells to improve capacity and coverage at reasonable cost, while supporting new models - but have been concerned about possible problems with interference, scalability and integration with the macro network.

"The femtocell industry has collaborated very effectively to define these key standards," said Dr Nick Johnson, CTO at ip.access, one of the specialist vendors that is implementing the new standards, which are femto adaptations within the 3GPP release 8 and forthcoming release 9 specs, and in the Broadband Forum's TR-069, which now includes a new femtocell data model. 3GPP Release 8 also includes the Iu-h standard for connecting femtos over IP to the core network. More details to follow of these new developments.

Related Stories

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Digital Money: The Convergence of Contactless Card and Mobile Payments

This report examines the emergence of digital money from the perspective of the convergence of card-based proximity payments to the...

Cloudbooks: Market Analysis and Forecasts
This report is based on interviews with device OEMs, retailers and resellers and provides a comprehensive analysis of the new cloudbook...