Pre-integrated software helps speed time to market for small cells

With most if not all Tier 1 vendors now adding support for small-cells the their product portfolios, anything that helps speed the introduction of the technology and drive down development costs is clearly going to be attractive.
This is a new market for many Tier 1’s whose businesses have traditionally been built on relatively low-volume, high-margin macro cell products with extended development cycles, and they will be looking to chipset providers to handle some of the integration headaches associated with a more compact, potentially high-volume product.
Software vendor Continuous Computing reported at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that its Trillium base station software is now pre-integrated with products from ten silicon providers, many of whose chipsets will be integrated into the new generation of small cell products, including femtocells.
Continuous Computing says its platform has the added advantage that in a femtocell environment it helps address the growth in signalling traffic, generated in large part by the growing number of smartphones, by offloading signalling from the mobility management entity (MME).
The vendor believes that LTE will provide a major opportunity for metro femtos and says that operators will begin incorporating them as part of their LTE deployment plans. It cites the example of NTT DoCoMo which it says has been clear about its intention to deploy metro femtos at an early stage of its LTE rollout.
A Femto Forum round table at the MWC revealed another Japanese operator, Softbank, as the rapidly emerging poster child for the femtocell community. Softbank’s strategy, which one commentator described as “taking the heavy engineering out of RF” spans residential, enterprise and rural deployments, with multi-femto deployments in village communities served by satellite backhaul and the creation of femtocell ‘grids’.
Cisco weighed in to the discussion with its own take on the cost savings that can be achieved using femtocells as part of an offload strategy. The company said its research showed that even compared to a macro network running at 100% efficiency there was still a crossover point where it makes commercial sense to provide a femtocell free of charge to a user consuming 1GB of data per month.
In a market that now includes many of the major chipset providers, femtocell pioneer PicoChip retains the major market share. The company had no less than 25 products on show at MWC, ranging from high-end femtos to a compact USB form factor.