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Mobile & Wireless
Stepping forward with standards
Femto Forum pushes now-generation standards; looks to LTE and WiMAX
by Jim Barthold
Even as it makes an all-out effort to standardize the interface
between a femtocell access point and a femto gateway, the
Femto Forum is looking ahead to assure that international
standards bodies consider femtos when developing
specifications for LTE and WiMAX.
The organization’s vendor members, at the urging of the 40
percent — and growing — group of operators that comprise the
Femto Forum, want to sort out the interface between the
broadband network and the cell gateway, “making sure that
when you plug your femtocell into your broadband … the
femtocell has a point on the network to talk to that will speak
its language and will accept traffic and send traffic to it in a
completely consistent manner,” said Simon Saunders,
chairman of the Femto Forum.
This is important because operators — among whom are new
Femto Forum members AT&T, China Telecom, SK Telecom,
Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile (international and U.S.) — want to
retail femtocells.
“The thing we’re working on here is enabling interoperability
between femtocells at the interface between the femto and
the first node of the operator’s network, the gateway that
aggregates the femto traffic together,” he said.
This sort of open interface would let operators use multiple
vendors’ femtos to interface with a single gateway and clear
the path for consumers to buy and self-install a femtocell
confident that it will speak to the mobile network.
Farther out, the Forum is partnering with standards bodies to
make sure that femtos are part of whatever is developed for
fourth generation wireless, be that LTE or WiMAX, Saunders
said.
“There are some tweaks within LTE and indeed within WiMAX
that will make them all the more friendly to femtocells,” he
said. “In 3G we very specifically have a case where over-the-
air nothing can be different for existing 3G mobile phones to
support femtocells. We don’t want any special changes
affecting the handsets. With LTE there’s still a certain amount
of fluidity which means that we can not only make it work but
we can have protocols within the handsets to do something
things that are really optimized for femto activities.”
That’s the road map which, for now, is rolling through the
femtocell to gateway interface standardization process pushed
by operator members who “said ‘We’re glad you’ve come up
with solutions; there are too many, sort it out, sort it out
quickly,’” Saunders said. “Vendors have responded to this
and now they’re aligned … (and) committed to following an
open standards path.”
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