Mobile News

Femtocell Group Signs Up 100th Member February 6, 2009

The Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment, has announced that is has reached 100 members. The body now boasts as members, all of the top 5 infrastructure vendors and 17 of the world’s top 20 operators covering more than 2.3 billion subscribers.The Forum was launched just 18 months ago with only seven specialist femtocell members and has since multiplied rapidly to over 100 companies which read like a Who’s Who of the industry. This momentum allows us to continue to overcome barriers as operators carry out advanced consumer trials and early deployments this year ahead of mass deployment in 2010, said Simon Saunders. At the beginning of 2008 we set ourselves some tough challenges – not least turning around a femtocell standard in record time. We’ve no intention of slowing down this year, which will be a critical period as operators start deployments.

Now that the 3GPP has committed to completing the WCDMA femtocell standard by the end of March the Forum will be working to ensure that devices from different vendors are fully interoperable, as well as supporting the 3GPP’s release 9 and its planned provision for IMS femtocells. There will also be a focus on developing ‘Home Zone services’, creating new mobile applications that take advantage of the ‘presence’ capabilities of femtocells and the ability to easily connect mobile phone users to the home network and the web.

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