The Femto Forum said today that it will begin the first interoperability testing for femtocells in March, a critical step in ensuring the miniature base stations become practically interchangeable from carrier to carrier.
The 3GPP approved the new IUH protocol in April, setting a standardized interface between femtocells and the core network. Ostensibly that means any femtocell using the IUH interface should be able to communicate with any femtocell or aggregation core gateway using the same protocol. But, as is so often the case, there is often a big gap between the setting of a standard and the release of truly interoperable equipment.
The Forum is working with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to host a UMTS plugfest, in which femtocell, femto network and security gateway and femto chipset vendors will submit their equipment for testing. Rather than pit them against one another, the plugfest will test whether they can work together—whether vendor A’s chipset or access point can communicate with vendor B’s gateway and so on. In addition to testing the interface, the plugfest will also test standardized security protocols that encrypt the carrier traffic over the public Internet.
For many certification groups, a plugfest is just a beginning step to fine tune various devices in the market. After collecting data from plugfests, organizations like the WiMax Forum or the WiFi Alliance generally begin certification, testing each vendor’s equipment to ensure it meets the specifics of the standard in addition to playing nicely with other vendors’ gear. The Forum hasn’t yet said if it plans to certify devices directly—putting the Femto Forum seal of approval on access points just as the WiFi Alliance gives WLAN equipment the ‘WiFi’ stamp. The Forum could chose to forgo certification or turn the process over to outside certification organizations.
Unlike the macro-cellular network, over which traffic traverses a carrier’s infrastructure from handset to core, the femtocell sits on the public network, using a customer’s home of business broadband connection to tunnel voice and data traffic back to the operator. While not replacing the operator’s macro network, femtocells are intended to provide them with an easy and quick way to augment their network capacity and coverage while spending next to nothing on infrastructure. Consequently femtocells will have to be, not only cheap, but standardized to a point customers can practically buy them off the shelf at a Best Buy or Radio Shack and expect them to work. According to Berg Insight, 12 million femtocells will ship in 2014 after being a negligible market for the last few years.
“Vendor interoperability is the key ingredient that will give operators the confidence to start mass deployments,” Femto Forum chairman Simon Saunders said in a statement. “Not only will this allow operators to start mixing and matching their technology providers as they do with mobile handsets today, it will also drive economies of scale to bring down the cost of the technology. We’ve had an overwhelming response from vendors keen to take part in this program. There are currently over twenty femtocell access point models and over a dozen network gateways on the market and this program will start to ensure they all work together harmoniously.”
The Forum’s interoperability plugfest does have some limitations though. So far it appears to be a very European affair, though GSM and UMTS operators in North America will be able to take advantage of the economies of scale in tri-band or quad-band femtocell access points. But in the US, the biggest drivers of femtocells have been the CDMA operators. Both Sprint (NYSE:S) and Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ,NYSE:VOD) have started selling CDMA femtocells to their customers, using on a non-standard platform supplied by Samsung, though Sprint has plans to launch an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-powered 3G femtocell in the future. The Femto Forum has made overtures to the CDMA camp, calling for a unifying standard for CDMA as well as GSM/UMTS femto networks, but so far its focus has remained entirely on GSM equipment.
AT&T also launched a femtocell (the “3G MicroCell”) a couple of weeks ago.