Femtocell plugfests announced – finally!
Posted Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:55:57 EDT by Aditya Kaul
At last there has been some progress on the Iuh femto interoperability front - with the announcement that the first femto plugfest is likely to take place in March 2010. This will include gateway vendors, chipset vendors and CPE vendors aimed at verifying the Rel 8 Iuh interface. The plugfest will also test the IPsec/IKEv2 security protocols. ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) will be the standards body overseeing the plugfest.
Ever since the Home Node B standard was ratified in the April 2009, there has been speculation about when the interoperability plugfests will happen. The Femto Forum has been trying hard to get these plugfests arranged for a long time now and the process has had some bumps along the way, with some vendors having reservations about participating. The Forum has also been debating and discussing who should be the third party doing these tests. The discussions seem to be finally bearing some fruit now.
The Forum is however keeping quiet about how many vendors are participating or who these are. They are likely to make the names official only in March 2010. Although the announcement says that there has been an ‘enthusiastic response’ to the interoperability program, it would be nice to know which vendors have shown an intent to participate in the first place.
How significant is this announcement from a market perspective? Most operators that are currently rolling out UMTS femtocells have the pre-standard kit and are doing their own interoperability tests in any case. However, for the rest of the carrier community who has been waiting in the wings, and would like to see a mature vendor ecosystem - this announcement could have probably come a bit earlier.
The sooner that standardized equipment gets in the field, the better it is for the femtocell market. However, speaking to most carriers it doesn’t look like standards or plugfests are the issues here. Although most carriers would like to see interoperable equipment, they seem to be more concerned about the business case and the cost of the device itself.