Creating the enterprise femto network

Kineto offered up its own answer to that problem at Mobile World Congress last week, releasing its latest UMA gateway optimized for enterprise networks. The new software allows clustered femtocells to act as part of self-organizing groups, Shaw said. The clustered femtocells not only pass connections and calls along to one another without intervention from the macro network, they form what is essentially a private cellular network, Shaw said. Calls made within in the enterprise are switched locally within the cluster, and most network signaling and mobility management are mitigated by the femtocell gateway, freeing up resources on the macro network, Shaw said. Kineto has also introduced billing that allows the carrier to define different rates for calls made within the femto network and calls to and from a user in the cluster. Kineto is starting off small—its gateway supports a group of 20 femtocells total—but clusters can be linked within an enterprise, allowing the largest enterprises to scale.

Shaw said he expects both enterprises and carriers to jump on the femto architecture as it provides much more flexibility than a WiFi solution—any cellular phone will do—and it’s far cheaper than other in-building enterprise cellular solutions. “The market has really been focused on consumer femtocells, but now that focus is shifting to the enterprise,” he said. “Traditional enterprise solutions have focused on the picocell, which are expensive and require professional installation and testing. Femtocells are a far cheaper and more convenient alternative.”

BEYOND THE ENTERPRISE

While the new platform targets the enterprise, it’s not hard to imagine clustered femtocell architecture expanding to the public network, Shaw said. Femtocells could be used to blanket whole buildings in public cellular coverage, creating parallel in-door networks to complement outdoor networks, Shaw said. Building such large-scale femto networks may seem far-fetched today, but operators may find financial incentives to build them sooner rather than later.

A study commissioned by the Femto Forum found that home femtocells alone could dramatically increase the average value of a customer to carriers. In the case of a typical European household of two subscribers with moderate voice and data usage, the study found that the total lifetime value of the customer increased 56% due to operational savings alone, i.e. opex savings realized from offloading traffic from the macro network. The study, conducted by Signals Research Group, further found that if femtocells were used to extend indoor broadband access, hard-to-reach households could be connected over subsidized femtocells at a cost 64% cheaper than extending marcocellular coverage.

According to forum chairman Simon Saunders, those scenarios aren’t far off in the future. Femtocell standards are still making their way through the 3GPP and 3GPP2, but the core technology is available today, and it’s available inexpensively, he said. “The attractive thing about this is the upfront costs of deploying femtocells are low,” Saunders said.

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