Femtocells Asia 2008, Asia’s very first international conference on femtocells organised by the UK-based Avren Events kicked off in the Shangri-La Hotel in Kuala Lumpur on 22 September.

While Avren’s previous Femtocells events held in Europe and the United States were attended by 250 delegates, Avren’s marketing director Carole Mayhew expects more delegates to attend its next Femtocells Asia event next year.

“We see femtocells as a growing technology and our Femtocells events are a natural extension of our Basestation Conference,” said Mayhew.

Founded in 2003, Avren held its inaugural Femtocells event in Europe last year, which also was the world’s first femtocells event.

It’s held three more Femtocells events -- one in Europe and two in the United States – with Femtocells Asia 2008 being its fifth.

But what are femtocells?

Roughly the size of an off-the-shelf WiFi access point/router, femtocells essentially are very small footprint mobile base stations which use wide-area network radio access technologies, such as GSM, UMTS, CDMA 2000 or WiMAX to serve the voice, data and potentially video needs of four to eight users, much like microcells and picocells do inside buildings, especially where signals from regular wide-area cells, known as macrocells, can’t reach.

Motorola engineers are credited with having developed a the first prototype femtocell in 2002 and they’ve come a long way since then.

For example, Japanese operator Softbank Mobile's chief technology officer (CTO), Junichi Miyakawa announced at Femtocells Asia 2008 that the company would be implementing a soft launch of 1,000 Femtocell access points in October 2008 with mass deployment plans for Jan 2009.

This would make Softbank Mobile Asia’s first operator and perhaps the world’s first to launch service using femtocells. In his keynote addres Miyakawa gave a detailed overview of their network and how it will support IMS Femtocells, with the promise of innovative new services for their consumers.

“We’re thrilled to hear the announcement of the first commercial rollout of 3G Femtocells and are privileged to be a part of it” said Ubiquisys CTO, Will Franks speaking from Avren’s Kuala Lumpur event.

Besides Japan, there's leading interest in femtocells in Europe and Taiwan, while trials are being conducted in Malaysia.

Since femtocells are usually attached to fixed broadband digital subscriber line (xDSL), cable or Ethernet connections in premises, they enable operators to provide in-premises cellular voice and data services without putting additional demand on operators’ macrocell networks, which has attracted much interest in them among mobile operators worldwide, including in Malaysia.

"For example, a femtocell can stream video or IP TV directly from the Internet to a mobile phone or other viewing device bypassing the mobile network, while the femtocell only sends a record of the viewing to the operator over the cellular network if required for billing or other purposes," said David Swift, senior marketing manager with Alcatel-Lucent, one of the event's gold sponsors.

Service providers can focus on managing their quality-of-service (QoS) and can also assign dedicated backhaul capacity to handsets,thus lowering latency (delays) and enabling faster response times. Femtocells also let mobile phones reduce their signal power, thus conserving battery life.

In vast countries, such as the United States and Canada, with high fixed line penetration of around 90%, femtocells enable cellular operators to provide service in remote areas beyond their macrocell coverage.

Also, houses in temperate regions use metalised glass windows to keep the heat in but this blocks radio signals, so femtocells are needed to provide service indoors and likewise where metalised glass windows are used to keep the heat out in tropical regions.

Femtocells have also created lucrative opportunities for upstream processor chip and software suppliers, simulator and test instrumentation manufacturers, as well as others.

Comm & Tech Asia speaks to some of them at Femtocells Asia.

Zero touch femtos

While femtocells have caught the attention of the market, there still are some issues, especially related to standardisation and configurability which have to resolved, according to Jean-Paul Rissen, Alcatel-Lucent director of wireless technologies.

Read the rest of the article in Comm & Tech Asia

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites