The standards are not currently in place in terms of protocols and interfaces, though work has begun both within the 3GPP and in the Femto Forum announced this week by seven players in the emerging market.
In their absence, meanwhile, other major telecoms equipment vendors like Ericsson offer closer-loop, proprietary systems comprising both the gateway and CPE base station, said Heikki Hemmi from the indoor radio solutions part of Nokia Siemens Networks’ Radio Access division. By contrast, he said Nokia’s strategy is to offer the gateway, then work with third-party femtocells, with the long-term goal of interoperating with them all, assuming they comply with the eventual standard.
In the nearer term, he said Nokia plans to announce alliances with one or two of the femtocell manufacturers to offer bundles of its gateway and their CPE.
Our View
With the announcement of its femto gateway, Nokia now has a presence in all the various technologies vying for carriers’ preference for fixed-mobile convergence services. It already has a UMA offering based on its own client software, and a UMA controller OEMed from Kineto, and of course it is also adding WiFi radios to some of its mobile phones for dual-mode operation.
