Orlando, Fla. -- Tatara Systems and picoChip will collaborate on and jointly market all-Internet Protocol solutions for the emerging femtocell market. The deal adds momentum to a fast-rising technology that could compete with cellular-handset-based voice-over-Wi-Fi and upend future cellular basestation deployment and revenue models.
The partners will develop a femtocell reference design, to be deployed within the home, based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and IP Multimedia Subsystem standards. This could ease the integration of femtocells into a mobile operator's network, enabling the significant advantages of an all-IP approach.
The collaboration will include picoChip's portfolio of products, including the PC8208 HSDPA Femtocell modem reference design, and the Tatara Mobile Services Convergence line, addressing voice and messaging convergence, security and enhanced services.
A femtocell, or 3G access point, is a low-cost, low-power cellular basestation that provides improved indoor coverage while backhauling the cellular traffic over a broadband connection. Recent advances in low-cost silicon technology make femtocells the most viable solution for convergence in service provider networks. ABI Research expects to see 102 million users of femtocell products on 32 million access points worldwide by 2011, the majority based on the all-IP architecture.
These products could obviate the need for voice-over-Wi-Fi, where cellular calls are handed off to a Wi-Fi network and then carried back to the mobile network over a DSL or cable broadband connection, said Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at picoChip Designs Ltd. (Bath, England). Carriers lose out on revenue when calls are handed off from the cellular network, he said, and performance has proved disappointing.
Femtocells give operators a chance to maintain that revenue with high-quality connections over licensed spectrum. Unlicensed Wi-Fi connections are prone to noise and latency.
Moreover, said Baines, greater coverage via femtocells means fewer basestations are required. He pointed to a Vodaphone survey that showed how deploying 1 million femtocells would increase network capacity by a factor of 10,000 and reduce its capex costs by 20 to 30 percent, saving $1 billion. Baines said that along with Vodaphone, Orange and Japan's Softbank are looking hard at the femtocell model. "It's big in Europe and Asia--the U.S. is behind," he said.
Companies such as 2Wire, a DSL gateway provider, are already developing femtocells. Others in the femtocell mix include Dekolink, ipAccess, RadioFrame and Ubiquisys. Kineto Wireless, an advocate of Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA), has partnered with NEC on femtocells, as has Tatara.
Jonathan Morgan, vice president of marketing and product management at Tatara Systems (Acton, Mass.), said the simplicity of the IP Multimedia Subsystem is what allowed his company to field a femtocell gateway smaller than a cable modem. Tatara used last week's CTIA conference in Orlando to showcase its technology on a femtocell made by Ubiquisys. Its server software appears to the network as a typical SIP application server.
According to Morgan, a typical femtocell would cost $150 to $200, have a range of roughly 300 feet and support four to eight users. PicoChip's Baines put the bill of materials for a femtocell based on that company's chips at $100.
Ken Kolderup, vice president of marketing at Kineto, said that UMA's ability to work in native IP and 3GPP environments meant that it was irrelevant whether the Kineto UMA controller was managing Wi-Fi gateways or femto basestations. Kineto developed its first interfaces for Wi-Fi because the technology was more mature, he said, but it is partnering with Ubiquisys on femto-to-UMA connections. "We really are agnostic, though the ability of femto to support premium service is not fully there yet," Kolderup said.
Azaire Networks Inc. has developed a family of security servers based on the Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture that interwork with dual-mode Wi-Fi/cellular and femtocellular environ- ments. Authentication and IPsec tunneling features are important in both, said CTO James Grams, since wireless operators often find traffic moving into the network from IP subnets, which they cannot predict or control. "The obvious appeal of femto is the ability to link any 3G device to the network," he said, "but let's be honest here--femto designs are still in their early days, and it's still not certain these basestations will work well in the home."
-- Additional reporting by Loring Wirbel
