Genband backs large-scale femtocell rollouts

Femtocells promise cheap voice and data calls at home

The large-scale roll out of femtocells, particularly within businesses, will form a vital part of the development of the fourth-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband standard, according to Genband, an IP infrastructure developer of media gateway devices for the network core.

The company is showing its support for femtocells by announcing that it will join the FemtoZone at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The FemtoZone was created by the Femto Forum and the GSM Association to showcase the technology at this year's event.

Genband believes that the spectrum in which LTE operates means that it often suffers from poor building penetration, resulting in low bandwidth and high mobile usage costs indoors.

The widespread implementation of femtocells should eliminate this shortcoming, and help telecoms networks to evolve from a fixed, passive and proprietary network to a mobile and fully distributed converged platform.

"The possible savings in terms of capital and operational expenditure are huge," said Sanjay Bhatia, director of product line management at Genband. " Also, the added possibilities surrounding triple and quadruple play will finally deliver some of the benefits of fixed-mobile convergence with the offer of cheap mobile voice and data services in the femto/home zone. Femtocells open up a new competitive angle for operators with the potential to acquire market share."

Bhatia claimed that femtocells will help to offer cheap voice and data calls at home, allow for greater continuity indoors, and provide dedicated and sustainable 7.2Mbit/s data transfer rates, as well as allowing a single handset for all needs.

At the same time, operators will be able to offer aggressive and targeted home zone packages, while driving premium service take-up by removing the cost and convenience barriers at home. It can also hugely increase capacity and reduce the backhaul operational expenditure because it uses the consumer's existing DSL data connection.

Genband will also be making a presentation at Mobile World Congress about securely deploying and connecting femtocells to 3G mobile core networks.

"This year's Mobile World Congress marks the beginning of the real acid test for femtocells. The FemtoZone will attempt to address the key issues, such as what is going to be the key driver for successful deployments, and are there going to be further technical hurdles to be addressed before we see large-scale deployment," said Professor Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum.