CTIA: GenBand touts femtocell opportunity

LAS VEGAS – The femtocell market represents a major opportunity for wireless service providers to push even more wireline substitution while making their own networks operate more efficiently, according to media gateway maker GenBand.

Texas-based GenBand used the CTIA show this week to take note of its significant wireless momentum and highlight opportunities in the femtocell space. Alcatel-Lucent announced its selection of GenBand’s new G9 Converged Media gateway as part of its mobile next-generation network, to provide a migration path from standalone mobile switching centers to centralized mobile call servers with distributed media gateways and then to IMS-compatible networks. GenBand had earlier announced it would collaborate with Mavenir Systems on network convergence as well.

The Alcatel-Lucent relationship provides substantial opportunities for GenBand, particularly internationally, said Mehmet Balos, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for GenBand. “They are looking at India, where the market is growing exponentially, as one of their biggest opportunities yet,” Balos said. “We have had a relationship with Alcatel-Lucent since 2002, and this confirms that.”

The confirmation comes on the heels of GenBand’s being named the number-one media gateway player in the US by Synergy Research.

But it was the femtocell possibilities that had GenBand revved up at CTIA as a key application for its new G9 platform, the system originally developed by Santera and acquired by GenBand as part of its purchase of Tekelec’s switching operation.

“We are in about 10 tier-one mobile carrier trials in Europe with femtocells,” said Sanjay Bhatia, product manager. The European carriers are looking to use femtocells to extend the reach of their 3G networks, he said.

“They can deploy femtocells, which the consumer buys and puts into their home, and pull mobile subscribers onto the 3G network, with better coverage,” Bhatia said. “They get fixed-mobile substitution in the process, pulling those voice and data minutes onto their network.”

Bhatia expects to see friendly user trials and a few limited commercial trials in 2008, followed by a soft launch late this year or in 2009.

The GenBand G9 sits in the network at an aggregation point to take the wireless traffic from the femtocells and efficiently put that traffic onto 3GPP and 3GPP2 networks.

“The mobile core doesn’t want those interfaces disturbed,” Bhatia said. “But the traffic coming off the Femtocells is IETF-based.”

The differentiation of the G9 in this space is its scalability, he added. “Femtocells will be deployed in the millions, so you need scalability, and we have proven scale in deployments like China Mobile. We can run 400,000 femtocells off a single gateway, and you can put three gateways in a seven-foot rack.”

GenBand is already partnering with Motorola in the femtocell arena and other as-yet unnamed partners as well.