Open standards are key to the success of femtocells because they provide a better system than proprietary standards can, according to the founder of the
Femto Forum, Will Franks.
“As in pretty much any area of the telecoms value chain, using open industry standards always delivers a better solution than proprietary ones,” said Franks, who is also CTO of Ubiquisys. “It allows an operator to source components
from a range of vendors, so leading to competition on price and efficiency, without getting locked into a single vendor model.”
The Femto Forum was founded in July this year to promote the adoption of femtocells.
“Like so often with successful products in this industry, for femtocells to become a reality I felt companies needed to collaborate first in order to develop the market in which they could compete effectively,” said Franks. “A fragmented market
could never get the femto price point low enough to make it compelling for consumers.”
The Forum announced more firms had joined last week, including, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Sagem, Thomson, Nokia-Siemens Networks, NEC, ZTE and Kineto Wireless. The original members are: Airvana, ip.access, Netgear, PicoChip, RadioFrame, Tatara and Ubiquisys.
“If our assumptions are correct, femtocells represent a massive global
opportunity for vendors like ourselves, operators, content providers and, of course, consumers,” said Franks. “There’s plenty of room in this market for multiple players.”
Motorola announced it has begun a
trial of its 3G femtocell offering with a “major European operator” having successfully completed testing.