Fixed Mobile Convergence Featured Article

April 07, 2009

First Femtocell Standard Published by 3GPP

By Bob Emmerson


The Femto Forum, 3GPP and the Broadband Forum have announced that the world's first femtocell standard has been published by 3GPP. This will pave the way for standardized femtocells to be produced in large volumes and enable interoperability between different vendors' access points and femto gateways.
The new standard covers four main areas: network architecture; radio & interference aspects (both completed last December); femtocell management / provisioning and security (finalized this month). In terms of network architecture, the crucial interface between potentially millions of femtocells and gateways in the network core has been called Iuh. (The world needed another meaningless acronym). This re-uses existing 3GPP UMTS protocols and extends them to support the needs of high-volume femtocell deployments.
The standard has adopted the Broadband Forum's TR-069 management protocol, which has been extended to incorporate a new data model for femtocells developed collaboratively by Femto Forum and Broadband Forum members and published by the Broadband Forum as Technical Report 196 (TR-196). TR-069, which is widely used in fixed broadband networks and in set-top boxes, will allow mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning, diagnostics-checking and software updates.
George Dobrowski, the Broadband Forum's Chairman, "All technologies require standards in order to make the transition from niche application to wide scale adoption. By employing and extending best of breed standards, such as TR-069 for management of the Femto Access Point (News - Alert) as part of the home network, this new femtocell standard has the best possible chance of succeeding.”
Work is already being done to incorporate femtocell technology in the 3GPP's release 9 standard, which will address LTE femtocells as well as support more advanced functionality for 3G femtocells. Femtocell (News - Alert) standards are also being developed for additional air interface technologies by other industry bodies.
Ubiquisys (News - Alert) says it will be the first vendor to support this standard, having already announced the first implementation and a timeline for mass-market deployment in January.

Bob Emmerson (News - Alert) is TMC's European Editor. To stay abreast of the latest news affecting the European market, check out Bob's columnist page.

Edited by Jessica Kostek

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