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22 May 2008

Femto forum agrees on single standard


In an effort to streamline an increasingly complex new technology, the femtocell community has agreed to follow a single standard for the interfaces between femtocell components, a move that will make the technology compatible with any network.

Femtocells, base stations allowing for the provision of high quality mobile broadband services indoors, are expected to take off in the next few years, but worried of fracturing technology, the Femto Forum called for a single standard from this point going forward.

According to website Telephony Online, Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum, explained that the move towards a single standard had been called for by mobile carriers.

"They really love the idea of femtocells, but it is really important for them to support femtos from multiple suppliers," the website reports him as saying. "In order to support four or five different femtocells in the network, they obviously don't want to have a gateway for every vendor."

ABI Research recently predicted that around 100,000 femtocell units will ship in 2009, a figure that is expected to rise dramatically by 2010, as large trials are transformed into fully fledged implementations.<br/>

© 2006 Adfero Ltd.

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