Hassan Ahmed, CEO of the Westford, Massachusetts-based company, cited research by Ovum that suggested that by 2010, the CPE market for FMC will be of the order of $1.7bn, of which $1.4bn will be femto base stations.
Those numbers may be overoptimistic, but it is clear that there is considerable operator interest in femtocell technology. An event on the subject in London over the last three days attracted in excess of 200 delegates, according to the organizer Avren.
Softbank is something of a poster child for the technology, running a technology demo in Japan that includes products from Ubiquisys, Motorola, ip.access, and Sonus, among others. Sonus clearly tied its colors to the femto mast with its acquisition earlier this year of UK developer Zynetix, which brought it an IP MSC to roll into its IMS core.
This is no bolting a regular MSC onto a fixed switch, as some of the competition is doing, said Andy Odgers, a founder of Zynetix and now VP of wireless technology at Sonus. The IP MSC will be rolled into the Sonus IMS core, so you’ll see common features and so on.
