The Femto Forum, an independent industry association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide, has named among its latest members NXP Semiconductors and Samsung.

Established in July 2007 by a handful of founding member companies including picoChip, the group saw its first real momentum in November when it added more than 25 new members, including Motorola, NEC, and Nokia Siemens Networks.

Today, the forum welcomed Acme Packet, AudioCodes, BT, Cellcom Israel, Cisco, Ericsson, GENBAND, Huawei, KTL, mobilkom austria, NewStep Networks, SaskTel, Softbank Mobile, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone, as well as NXP and Samsung, to its ranks. The additions bring the forum's membership to 59 companies.

The forum also announced today that it has launched a programme to help harmonise the integration of femtocells into mobile core networks. Femtocells, a relatively new technology, are cellular access points that connect to a mobile operator's network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections.

They have been developed to work with a range of different cellular standards including CDMA, GSM and UMTS, which presents both technical opportunity and challenges as mobile operators look to integrate with networks that are standards-based, but are subtly different and include proprietary elements.

The group explained that operator demand to launch femtocells quickly has led to the development of many different methods for integrating potentially millions of femtocells into the network core. While that is not holding up the commercial deployment of femtocells, Femto Forum believes its program will help unite these different approaches in the longer term and set the stage for the development of future standards.

"Femtocells have got off to a flying start and more deployments will take place in the near future but it is crucial that all the players in the market begin to plan together for the longer term," said Simon Saunders, chairman of the Femto Forum, in a statement.

"This program represents the first time the femtocell community has come together to forge a future technology path through consensus. This conjoined approach will not only encourage interoperability and increase economies of scale thereby helping keep costs low, but it will also help to support far-reaching new femtocell applications."

The Femto Forum has a plenary scheduled for March where it said a variety of approaches to femtocell network integration will be put forward by members. Synergies between the approaches will be identified and the Femto Forum will provide a framework within which consensus can be built around similar approaches.

The forum has already agreed a reference architecture which will be used to provide a consistent basis for comparison between the different network integration options. A set of criteria that any integration method must meet in order to satisfy operator requirements has also been agreed, including scalability and multi-vendor support.

By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News - Electronic News