Femto Forum changes name for small cell boom

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Femto Forum changes name for small cell boom

Trade body becomes Small Cell Forum, reflecting the expansion of tiny base stations from the living room to the metrozone

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 15 February, 2012

READ MORE: Infrastructure | Femtocell | LTE

The new mobile network will be built on small cells, and this month's Mobile World Congress will feature scores of shrunken, low power base stations designed to boost capacity and quality of service for rising tides of data. These metrocells are becoming a commercial reality, many of them drawing on techniques pioneered in the residential femtocell space. To reflect that, and expand its influence to the public access market, the Femto Forum is changing its name to the Small Cell Forum in time for the MWC show.

The industry body's remit will now embrace standards, policy and market awareness for all kinds of small base stations - for residential, enterprise, rural and metrozone use, and including indoor and outdoor, and public or private access deployments. This represents a total market of about 4.3m units this year, and while 90% of those will still be residential in 2012, the Forum believes two-thirds of revenue will come from public access products. While this is unlikely to silence the semantic arguments over the differences between picocells, metrocells, femtocells and so on, at least the adoption of the umbrella name reflects the common architectures on which many of those variants will be built.

The Forum and its key members have spent the past few years pushing a residential technology into a broader arena, and arguing that many techniques previously considered applicable only to consumer grade gear were actually suited to carrier class infrastructure. System-on-chip platforms with low power and low cost will be as essential to public access base stations as to femtocells, as will qualities like self-provisioning and no-touch management. So, while specialist femto companies like Picochip have pushed into the metrocell area, traditional network chip suppliers like Texas Instruments have borrowed many femtocell techniques for their latest 'base station on chip' designs.

Reflecting that trend, the renamed Forum will "serve to develop consensus on common approaches, standards and agreed best practice for all small cells that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence", said the organization's statement. It will also continue to make submissions to industry standards bodies like the 3GPP, and will work with bodies governing related technologies which also address the capacity crunch, and are likely to work alongside metrocells as often as compete with them. These include Wi-Fi, Cloud RAN, Distributed Antenna System (DAS) and HetNet. The key role of the Forum is to "tackle the practical challenges facing deployment" such as interaction with other cells and technologies, backhaul or site planning.

"Femtocell technology was originally designed for the home but has since extended into enterprise picocells, urban metrocells and modern microcells for all manner of locations," said Forum chairman Simon Saunders. "The core technologies developed by members of the Femto Forum - including systems on a chip, provisioning systems, standardized gateways, and other related innovations - lower the cost of licensed band solutions and facilitate easy deployments for all small cell products. Surveys show operators regard small cells as playing a more important role than macrocells in future mobile networks."