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More signs that 2010 really will be the year that femtocells go mainstream - following T-Mobile's announcement of an interoperability test program earlier this week, China Unicom has revealed that it has already started its promised roll-out, while one of the main start-up vendors, Ubiquisys, has shifted towards a software licensing model, a classic sign of a market gaining scale.

Unicom has launched its '3G Inn' femto service, with the emphasis on improved indoor coverage for voice and data, over 7.2Mbps HSPA. Huawei announced the deployment, saying that "launched initially in Beijing, China Unicom expects to roll out this service nationwide". However, it is thought that the carrier is using multiple suppliers, with Alcatel-Lucent likely to be another one.

Meanwhile, another femto vendor, UK-based Ubiquisys, has unveiled its Femto-Engine, the world's first 'software femtocell', which splits the functionality of the tiny base station from the underlying hardware. This separates key software functionality from the hardware and could be licensed to any femto manufacturers. This is a trend seen in many markets driving for consumer electronics economics, notably Wi-Fi, where several of the early access point makers dropped hardware sales and licensed their software instead, especially in high value areas like WLan security or network management. As emerging device markets push for economies of scale, commoditization of the hardware platform ensues, while the intelligence and differentiation is maintained by the chip designers (feeding into reference platforms as well as branded vendor products) and the software.

Femto-Engine majors on self-organizing intelligence, which Ubiquisys sees as a key differentiator. Other key features are multimode access control, emergency call handling, and a sophisticated remote management and diagnostics system. Femto-Engine supports all the common interfaces to the core network, not just Iuh but also GAN, SIP and IMS. There is also an enterprise edition of Femto-Engine with added elements such as meshed grid support, allowing companies to blanket buildings with groups of self-organizing femtocells.

The company has also announced its 'Engine-Ready' hardware program, which allows partner manufacturers to produce devices at low cost and time to market. The first product to emerge from this system is the G3-mini from SerComm, which is based on a complete hardware reference design from Ubiquisys, optimized to run its Femto-Engine software. The 3G network complexity is encapsulated in the Femto-Engine software, says Ubiquisys, and it particularly aims the new approach at vendors that want to integrate femtocell modules into home and enterprise appliances such as routers. The G3-mini is 8cm tall, consumes less than 5W of power, and supports HSPA+ and up to eight simultaneous calls.

"By encapsulating femtocell complexity in our Femto-Engine software we are enabling a more effective femtocell ecosystem. OEMs can follow the DSL and Wi-Fi model to cost-optimize the production of femtocell hardware and quickly integrate the technology into more and more products," said CEO Chris Gilbert. The firm says it does not plan to quit selling its own hardware units.

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