Two forums are teaming up with the goal of producing a WiMax femtocell. Today the Femto Forum and the WiMax Fourm announced plans to collaborate on specifications for WiMax femto access point, tackling such issues as end-to-end quality of service (QoS), provisioning, network authentication, power optimization and mobility management. Though the two organizations won’t be producing a femto of their own, they’ll produce a framework on which the growing number of femtocell manufacturers can design their own WiMax products.
While operators like Sprint (NYSE:S) and Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) have used femtos primarily as a means of expanding voice coverage into customers’ homes, the Femto Forum and its membership have been trying to promote the home-base-station as a means to build more capacity into the network. As a data-only access technology WiMax fits right in that strategy.
Many of the devices that will support WiMax–laptops, Internet tablets, etc.–will also support WiFi, making a WiMax femtocell limited use in the home where WiFi prevades. But femtocells can also be used as a way of augmenting capacity in the macro network, providing what amounts to a whole channel of capacity to an individual or small group of users. Femto Forum chairman Simon Saunders has pointed out that wireless radio technologies have reached their spectral efficiency limits. Future capacity growth in the network will be accomplished through shrinking the size of cells, something the femto is perfectly positioned to do.
Eventually WiMax femtos may be needed for coverage purposes as well. Sprint plans to offer CDMA/WiMax dual-mode handsets, and chipset vendors have discussed the possibility of WiMax only consumer electronics devices emerging. Sprint is even entertaining the notion of turning the femtocell paradigm on its head: Instead of using a wired broadband connection to backhaul WiMax traffic over the Internet, Sprint 4G vice president Todd Rowley has proposed that a WiMax broadband connection could be used as the backhaul component. Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) is already offering a forerunner of such technology: a portable WiFi router that distributes the WiMax connection amoing multiple devices.