• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

Femtocell vendors have been working for some years on applications which will enhance the appeal of their products, supporting services which are specifically enabled by the devices, rather than just improving indoor signals. Now that the miniaturized base stations are finding their way into public access and outdoor networks, there is new pressure to add value for users and carriers, by creating an apps ecosystem around the small cell.

The newly renamed Small Cell Forum is collaborating with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) , which focuses on interoperable enablers of new wireless services. The two bodies are to develop standardized small cell APIs (application programming interfaces) to help programmers create apps which particularly harness the features of small cells, such as precise location and presence awareness.

These capabilities have led to various applications for indoor femtocells, such as NTT DoCoMo's software to tell parents when their children have arrived home, triggered once the child is within the femto's orbit. Now similar approaches could be extended to public networks, giving cellcos another way to tap into the rising interest in location aware services. The Small Cell Forum offers an example of a Telecom Italia app, which automatically provides museum visitors with information about an exhibit, on their phones, when they stand near it.

Creating a common set of APIs reduces complexity and time to market for developers and enables the resulting apps to run on any supporting small cell network. Such apps are just one way that carriers aim to harness the inherent capabilities of their RANs in order to provide services which are differentiated from those of over-the-top rivals.

Tapping into specific functionality of small cells, as the operators start to deploy these to improve 3G and 4G capacity and coverage, will be part of that strategy and is attracting interest from various cellco-driven API projects, not just the OMA's, but also those run by the GSM Association and the Wholesale Application Community (WAC). All these look to open up and proliferate operator APIs to encourage developers to take advantage of network capabilities to enhance their apps.

"Small cell technology allows application developers to incorporate enhanced presence, context and location sensitive features into new and existing apps," said the Forum's statement. "Small cells also allow operators and their customers to take advantage of faster data connections by extending existing network capabilities. For example, a small cell can efficiently provide location information to within a few metres [both indoors and outdoors], making location-based apps vastly more consistent and effective." The Forum published its first APIs a year ago, defining how to write apps based on femtocell technologies.

The OMA believes that working with its new partner will help guard against fragmentation and broaden the addressable market for programmers. "OMA sees this cooperation as an important step in harnessing the broad technical strengths of OMA's API program with the keen market insight of the Small Cell Forum," said chairman Mark Cataldo." The body says more than 30 operators and vendors have endorsed its API initiative.

Related Stories

COMMENTS

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

Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East
Carriers are using mobile broadband as their weapon of choice in the fight against the commoditization of voice and falling ARPU. This...

Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts
VoLTE offer unique advantages in lowering a carrier's voice infrastructure economics and promises to improve voice quality, device...