Kineto releases UMA femtocell software

Kineto said today it is releasing a femtocell software solution based upon unlicensed mobile access (UMA), the GSM tunneling architecture it uses to deliver voice calls from a Wi-Fi hotspot to the cellular core.

Kineto’s UMA Network Controller currently powers several trial and commercially launched fixed/mobile convergence platforms, including T-Mobile’s Hotspot@Home service, which uses home Wi-Fi routers and hotspots to take voice calls and the public Internet to connect back to T-Mobile’s circuit-switched network. Kineto has now optimized that same technology for femtocell deployments, said Steve Shaw, vice president of marketing for Kineto.

Femtocells eschew alternate wireless access networks for a cellular home network model, femtocells being in essence miniature home base stations accessed by the same GSM and UMTS devices on the macro-cellular network. Unlike their macro counterparts, though, femtocells use a home broadband connection as backhaul to the cellular network, meaning they need a secure transport protocol to tunnel through the public Internet, Shaw said. While Iu-B is the typical protocol used to connect base stations to radio network controllers, the 3GPP architecture was not designed with femtocells’ scale in mind, Shaw said.

“Iu-B was never really designed to deal with a femtocell-type market,” Shaw said. “It was never designed to scale to the point where you had hundreds of thousands of base stations in a market.”

UMA isn’t the only protocol targeting femtocells. Other SIP-based protocols designed to integrate with carriers’ IMS architectures are being used in some femtocell designs.