Getting the femtocell industry off the ground in terms of regulatory and interference issues and ease of installation, were the main aims of the Femtocell Conference in Dallas last week.

"Everyone who is working in femtocells is getting together to make things happen," Rupert Baines, v-p of marketing at PicoChip, and inventor of the term 'femtocell', told Electronics Weekly.

"With the regulatory issues, we are trying to make sure that there are not going to be any barriers to deployment," added Baines. "Then there's the networking architecture issue of finding a standard way of fitting it into the networks and making it cheap and easy to deploy, and then there's the radio side, making sure there are no interference problems."

The attraction of femtocells to network operators is that they both improve network coverage, and increase capacity on the network. So, instead of having to spend $350,000 to build a 3G basestation, and then spend $1,500 a year on the connections to it, the operators' customers buy their own base stations and pay for their own connections, and the same effect of improved coverage and capacity is achieved.

Another attraction for operators is that femtocells may help head off home users using Skype over WiFi from their homes.

No one knows what the market for femtocells will be. Something between 20 million and 40 million units in five years time is seen as achievable, once all the background issues are resolved.

"The lovely thing about femtocells is that work with existing hand-sets, you don't have to worry about interoperability," said Baines, "the big thing is how do you get them into the network? It is like how it was with DSL, how do you plug them in and get them to work? If there is going to be 30m out there you need them to plug in and work straight out of the box."