LONDON — The femtocell industry has sealed a deal with the Broadband Forum to use the latter's well-tried and embedded TR-069 specifications to make home base station installation, service provisioning and remote management as easy as possible for network operators.
Working under the auspices of the Femto Forum, the members involved in customer premises equipment supply and management have agreed to use this standard, which is already used in some 30 million devices for device management of fixed-line broadband services.
Adopting this protocol and adapting it for femtocells will introduce a standards-based approach to so-called "zero-touch" provisioning. This ensures that users can just plug their femto access point into a power socket to make it operational.
TR-069 — otherwise known as "CPE WAN Management Protocol" — was defined by the broadband industry in 2004. The specification covers auto-configuration and dynamic service activation, firmware management, and performance monitoring, such as diagnostics and connectivity and service control.
There are two elements to the specification: a TR-069 client, which is built into the CPE devices; and server-based auto-configuration software that communicates with the devices and the service provider's operations support systems.
The specs are used for the remote provisioning and management of a broad range of fixed-line broadband CPE, such as DSL modems, set-top boxes, VOIP devices, and home gateways.
The Femto Forum is compiling a list of management capabilities and parameters that need to be added to TR-069, which the Broadband Forum will use to create a new femto-specific data model.
The work is expected to be completed by the end of 2008.
"Femtocells are sophisticated pieces of telecommunications equipment, but they are also first and foremost consumer devices and as such they have to be simple enough to be installed and used by the average consumer. Many people have been concerned about the scalability of provisioning and management for femtocells: with this initiative that concern is addressed," said Simon Saunders, the Femto Forum's Chairman.
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