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Last year, the main issue worrying operators about wide scale deployment of femtocells was potential interference. Now that challenge has largely been addressed, according to Qualcomm, and key operator issues are value added services for customers, and standard ways to connect thousands of tiny base stations to the core network.

Three players are collaborating in the latter area, with the first demonstration of the Iuh standard, which will allow multivendor femtocells to interoperate with the operator's core in a common way. Chip designer picoChip, mobile packet core router maker Starent, and Continuous Computing, will show off the recently approved 3GPP standard in action, a demo that they say will help give carriers confidence in the technology.

The companies will run the live demo of the 3GPP Release 8 Iuh interface between the 3G Home Node-B (the 3GPP's name for femtocell) and the 3G Home Node-B Gateway, at next week's Femto Summit in London. The products involved will be the Starent ST40 platform with support for Home Node B Gateway; picoChip's picoXcell femtocell silicon and PHY software; and the Trillium femto software from Continuous. This will be a forerunner of broader cross-industry trials as part of planned 'plugfests' this year under the auspices of the Femto Forum.

Meanwhile, Rasmus Hellberg, director of technical marketing at Qualcomm, said concerns about interference between femtocells are unfounded if proper management techniques are implemented. "This largely revolves around limiting, or managing, the transmit power of the femtocell and handsets. We have developed the techniques to enable this and do not see interference as being a roadblock to deploying 3G femtocells," he told FierceWireless, adding that changes to current standards would only be necessary when femtocells are deployed with extreme density.

Meanwhile, the latest market study of this nascent segment, from iDate of France, predicts that the global femto market will generate €875m in revenues for operators by 2013, based on 9.7m shipped units. However, the researchers say a key challenge for femto vendors and service providers will be to communicate a convincing value proposition to consumers, especially if they are expected to pay for the devices themselves rather than enjoying full operator subsidies. Integrated service providers are best positioned to offer femtocell solutions as, in addition to extending mobile networks to the household, femtocells are fully convergent solutions, said iDate.

It believes the leading early market will be the US, which will account for 50% of the products shipped by 2013, with Asia-Pacific in second place with 28% of units. This US-centric view is because north American consumers see strong added value even in the simplest application of the femtocell, improved indoor coverage, while Asian and western European users want more sophisticated features such as fixed/mobile convergence and new applications.

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