Femto Forum gains followers

The new industry advocacy group of femtocells is building up its ranks, announcing this week a new roster including heavy hitters from the wireless industry. The Femto Forum’s membership now includes operators such as Telefonica O2, Rogers Wireless and India’s Bharti Airtel as well as infrastructure vendors Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens.

The first operator to commercially deploy femtocells, Sprint, is not on the list, however. Neither is Sprint’s femtocells supplier Samsung. Sprint’s early deployment in Denver and Kansas City took many by surprise, as the first commercial trials of the home base station technology weren’t expected until 2008, when technical and standards issues might be worked out. But as a CDMA operator, Sprint wasn’t working within the framework of Europe’s GSM standards bodies, letting it get a jump on the market.

The Femto Forum itself has a distinctly GSM flavor, with all of the operators participating running GSM/UMTS networks, but the Forum’s chairman, Simon Saunders, said it is working with all of the standards bodies—CMDA and WiMAX included—to accelerate femtocells development and deployment. One of the group’s founding members, Airvana, was originally entirely a CDMA radio company, while Alcatel-Lucent is the largest CDMA equipment maker in the world.

The rest of the industry won’t be far behind Sprint, Saunders said. “There’s nothing stopping someone from deploying a completely standardized femtocell solution today. It’s a question of whether the technology is the most cost-effective solution or if it’s interoperable. We’re looking toward creating scalable solutions for those commercial launches.”

The forum has created four working groups to tackle those issues: regulatory, network and interoperability, radio and physical layer and marketing and promotion. The new members are: Alcatel-Lucent, Aricent, Azaire Networks, Bharti Airtel, Bouygues Telecom, Carphone Warehouse Networks, Celcom, Continuous Computing, General Communication, Kineto Wireless, Mapesbury Communications, Mavenir Systems, MobileOne, Motorola, NEC, Nokia Siemens Networks, Orascom Telecom, PCCW Mobile HK Limited, Pirelli Broadband Solutions, Rakon, Rogers Wireless, Reef Point, Sagem Communications, SerComm, Sonus Networks, Starent Networks, Telefónica O2, Thomson, Unwired Australia, UTStarcom and ZTE Corporation. These members join the seven original founding members: Airvana, ip.access, NETGEAR, picoChip, RadioFrame, Tatara and Ubiquisys.