Small Cells World Summit 2012
The Small Cells World Summit continued to generate news today in London and we summarize the events here and continue our reporting. We also report on news flow from just prior to the opening of the Summit from NEC, ip.access, SpiderCloud and Freescale.
Day 2 (June 27, 2012)
Today we report on some exciting news in the semiconductor, software and equipment areas.
In semiconductors, on June 18, at its annual Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) event Freescale Semiconductor announced a new metrocell base station SoC in its QorIQ Qonverge portfolio – the B4420 fills in a gap between the macrocell B4860 basestation SoC they announced at Mobile World Congress this year and the femtocell PSC9130/1 and picocell PSC9132 products and this portfolio continues to rank among one of the most complete small cell families there is.
Also prior to the opening of the Summit we saw NEC make two very important equipment announcements. The first, on June 21, was that they are partnering with SpiderCloud to deploy SpiderCloud’s SmartCloud™ E-RAN to their enterprise small cell customers. According to NEC their small cell footprint extends to 20 carriers worldwide and this deal will help enterprises link cellular systems to the enterprise LAN and applications. The SmartCloud system is designed as an alternative to distributed antenna systems, the most common mechanism for boosting mobile performance in an office.
NEC hit the news again on June 22, when they announced extensions to their small cell portfolio covering the range from home, enterprises, public spaces and outdoors. The impressive NEC portfolio spans this range with the FP183 for the home and small office, the FP1624 for medium-sized enterprises and public areas and the outdoor FMA1630.
Again on June 22, in the software area, ip.access released their next generation small cell management tools. The company’s Network Orchestration System (NOS) combines a full suite of tools that will enable operators to quickly deploy small cells and introduce new services, and is a very useful tool helping operators register, support and manage the small cell layer.
Node-H a pure-play small cell software supplier, announced on June 26 that their complete software solution for residential and enterprise small cells has been ported to the Qualcomm FSM920x chipset. The software includes Qualcomm’s UltraSON algorithms and according to the company, the HSPA+ Node-H software is the only complete small cell software available for multiple chipsets.
There were several news items, reported in multiple places, which caught our attention. The first was that O2 UK has installed what it claims as the world’s densest femtocell installation with 1,500 access points installed in a single apartment in London. Elsewhere we read that SK Telecom successfully started rolling out, what they claim is, the world’s first LTE small cell network and AT&T, Sprint, Telefnica and China Mobile have all committed to rolling out 3G small cell services.
