Roundup of highlights from the 8th LTE World Summit 2012

Here is round of articles summarising LTE World Summit. The agenda is available here to view. The tweets are available here.

22nd May


Signalling Focus Day Summary:

• Highlights and Pictures of Signalling day from 8th LTE World Summit - 3G4G Blog
• Diameter a hot topic at the LTE World Summit - Informa

Operator Mindshare Summary:

• LTE Operator Mindshare on Small Cells - Think Small Cell
• Right Pricing LTE ... and Mobile Broadband in general - Kim Kyllesbech Larsen 

23rd - 24th May

Main Conference News and Summary:

• Smallcelling LTE networks - Telecom at Home and on the Road
• Orange Spain CTO calls for active LTE network sharing - Mobile Europe
• Ofcom sticks to guns over 1800 refarming, LTE auction - Mobile Europe
• Mobile video – turning demand into dollars
• LTE World Summit: Apple, OTT, WiFi and being the "conscience of the future" - Mobile Europe
• 70 Per Cent Of Carriers Believe It's Time To Launch 4G
• LTE World 2012: Hola, Barcelona - Light Reading
• LTE World Summit 2012 and Small Cells - David Chambers
• Mobile Cloud Dynamics and Dimensions
• On LTE Roaming ...

LTE Awards 2012:

• LTE Awards 2012 Winners Announced! - Telecoms.com

Official Summary:

• The official LTE World Series Blog
• Highlights from the LTE World Summit 2012
• Full disclosure

Presentations available online

• The Next ‘Killer Device’ - Zahid Ghadialy
• Policy & Charging Control Developments to take advantage of LTE capabilities - Oisin O'Connor
• LTE World Summit Keynote - Gulzar Azad on Hangout
• What Device and Application Isn't My Teenage Son Using On the Internet? - Jonathan Morgan
• “All You Can Eat” Network Contracts: Feasibility and Target Price - Tomi Paatsila, Omnitele
• Diameter and LTE Roaming - Anjan Ghosal, Diametriq

Will add more links as and when they become available

Second hand report from the Femtocell World Summit 2011 (#FWS11)

Here is a summary from the Femtocells World Summit 2011 that I have compiled from different blogs and twitter. I was unable to be there, due to the expense, location and timing of this event it simply wasn’t feasible for me to attend. I am also disappointed that the organisers are not more welcoming of bloggers and do not understand how valuable our participation can be for the summit. Peronally, I would have taken a few pics of the exhibition, as I have done in the past, as it would have provided a better idea about the event to people in different parts of the world. Anyway, summay as follows:

DAY 1 began with Simon Saunders from the Femto Forum. Some of his points:

• 60% of consumers are interested in femtocells now Another interesting statistic was that there are now more 3G femtocells in the world than there are 3G macrocells, which again agrees with data stating that 60% of operators think small cells are more important than macrocells in the success of LTE.

According to the Ubiquisys blog: Simon’s thoughts are best summed up with a sort of rallying cry he came up with: “Our cells are small but our goals are not”!

This was followed by, Thilo Kirchinger, Principal Product Manager forVodafone Group. He discussed Vodafone’s operational stance on femtocells and small cells, and during which confirmed that Vodafone would indeed be launching LTE femtocells.

• Thilo also spoke about how he sees femtocells integrating and being used by people in home environments. For example, instructions for home femtocells should be as simple, with as little technical information as possible, limiting potential confusion for the end user, while voice communications is still the biggest draw for this kind of residential femtocell (despite the fact that people tend to use a lot of data for things like app browsing when at home).

• There are now 9 Vodafone subsidiaries with commercial femtocell service – almost a third of the total – and more are to follow shortly.

• Research showed that some 34% of the UK either have insufficient or unsatisfactory indoor mobile coverage and Wi-Fi only partly solves the issue.

• In summary, he'd like to see accelerated standardization of the Iu-h interface, for the femtocell supplier ecosystem to start engaging with the Connected Home industry and for femtocell costs to reduce further.

• David Chambers of thinkfemtocell.com asked how operators, such as Vodafone, with strong brands of being the best mobile network and coverage could reconcile asking customers to pay for a box to fix poor coverage problems. Thilo felt that femtocells were complementary (especially for growing indoor use) and by offering both (ie great outdoor macrocell coverage plus great indoor femtocell service) it gave them competitive advantage. Another question related to 3rd party broadband internet – he reported that this hadn't been a problem, especially where customers conduct a speed test as part of the pre-sales process.

Telecom Italia’s Ferruccio Antonelli took the third slot of the day with a presentation focusing on the company’s commercial trial and proposed launch of femtocells in Italy.

• Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM to the locals), has always been a bit of a trendsetter in the mobile industry and is one to watch. They have the highest penetration rate and smartphone takeup of any European country. They will launch femtocell services next month (the precise date is commercially withheld), with Alcatel-Lucent providing two sizes of femtocell (seems very similar to Vodafone products).

• It won't be mandatory to use Telecom Italia broadband – any third party wireline/cable broadband can be used. While the pricing also can't be revealed, their billing system will be flexible enough to offer different prices when customers are using their "femtozone" at home.

• It sounds like it’s been a time of experimentation in Italy for femtocells thus far, but signs are looking good, with Ferruccio stating that femtocells will see launch in the second half of 2011. There was also some discussion on Twitter stemming from Telecom Italia’s idea of a ‘femtozone’ tariff or simply keeping pricing the same.

• A major issue for their implementation was the regulatory requirement to know if the femtocell has been moved (so that emergency services go to the right address) – this is checked by ensuring that at least one external macrocell ID is the same as when the unit was first installed and/or that the Telecom Italia broadband IP address matches.

• Unusually, TIM want to have SIM cards to authenticate their femtocells – so for example faulty femtocells can be replaced and by swapping the SIM card would automatically reconfigure for that customer.

Some insights from South Korea was provided by Samson Tae-Yong Kim from SK Telecom, whose presentation focused on using femtocells for data offload.

• Of particular note was the disparity raised by Kim in terms of data usage between different types of phone. For example, some smartphone users are consuming as much as 1 gig of data on an ‘all-you-can-eat’ plan in the same amount of time that it would take a feature phone user to consume 10 megs. It’s also worth mentioning at this point that 20% of mobile phone users in South Korea have smartphones, and this number is sure to grow.

• South Korea Telecom (SKT) plan to deploy some 10,000 public hotspots before the end of the year, many equipped with both Wi-Fi and cellular. They've previously used a lot of repeaters to ensure excellent (voice) coverage, but now need to bring in heavy additional capacity and higher speeds.

Alcatel Lucent: Steve Kemp looked at how data usage is now ballooning – indeed, that we are now “nearing the practical limits of information theory” –

• This is a generation that is watching 2 billion Facebook videos a month and 2 billion YouTube videos a day.

• Alcatel-Lucent expects mobile traffic growth to be in the order of 30x in the next five years.

• Just look at the iPad – users consumer twice as much data (and signalling) as the average iPhone user.

• What’s the problem? Signal to noise. As Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in 1948 theorized, a network is limited intrinsically by the noise generated by the media and the users. As you get more users, it degrades the overall capacity of the network.

• LTE, despite being more spectrally efficient than 3G, has a theoretical capacity limit, under Shannon’s Law, of 3.5 mbps per hertz.

• The answer to this inescapable fact is to make the cell size smaller so that spectrum is more efficiently used. And use beam forming to focus spectrum where you need it, away from interference

• Kemp then moved onto the business case for femtocells. You need initially to improve customer retention because keeping customers is a whole lot easier than gaining new ones.

• Femtocells result in a 60% downlink improvement, and a 26% uplink improvement. With lower latency, customers are happier with their voice calls at home and churn less. You can build a business case for home femtocells on this alone.

• Metro femtocells have even more compelling business case. The more traffic is offloaded onto small cells, the users on macro cell also see a service improvement.

• Steve also raised a point that kept reappearing through the morning: iPads (and tablets in general) are far more data hungry than iPhones/smartphones, which is certainly food for thought when considering the sudden surge in popularity of these devices.

• Alcatel-Lucent also announced their femtocell application developer kit, which is based on the recently published Femto Forum femtocell API specification. Already 23 developers have signed up to use it, with the first application to be made available by Telecom Italia when they launch.

As the morning progressed, it was the turn of Nigel Toon, CEO at Picochip, to present his thoughts and findings on the impact of femtocells on network performance and capacity.

• Nigel noted that voice communication is still one of the most important reasons why people select a carrier. Nigel also raised the point that no one really knows by how much mobile data traffic usage is expanding (or due to expand), with various different proposals raised during day one of FWS 2011 alone.

• Mobile data traffic exploding – you guess by how much. Is it 30x, 50x or even 1000x ?

• Problem is carriers capex can’t grow at 1000x

• Currently carriers spend, on average, 20% of their revenues on capex. And the cumulative amount of capex is increasing 8% year on year).

• Need to serve customers more efficiently and at a lower cost.

• Today a user in the middle of macrocell might only experience 40kbps. Tomorrow, with femtocells, the user can enjoy 8mbps while increasing the performance (less crowing on the macro) to 170 kbps.

• The key to low cost deployment is self-organizing, self-configuring, interference management and remote management.

• Picochip reaffirmed the issue of replacing repeaters with additional capacity, suggesting that rationing wasn't the right answer for customers who have grown to love data access. The web will only increase reliance on data connectivity and network operators will need to respond by building out a new network layer to meet demand.

Nitin Bhas from Juniper Research discussed the principals of mobile data offload and onload, where ‘offload’ means data migration from mobile to fixed, and ‘onload’ vice-versa. The spectre of tablets such as the iPad and smartphones being data hogs was once again raised during Nitin’s presentation, as was the important of the ‘offload’ of data due to this very reason.Mobile data traffic from smart phones, tablets and other devices to grow to 14,211 petabytes by 2015. This will be equivalent to 18 billion video downloads. By 2016, 63% of this will be offloaded to Wifi or femto.

Bill Chang, chief planning and strategy officer, UMobile explained that UMobile is a new challenger in Malaysia, challenging three well entrenched incumbents Digi (leader in price), Maxis (leader in products) and Celcom (leader in coverage.)

• Malaysia has 120% penetration, expected to rise to 150% within 5 years. 28 m population.

• 70% of market revenues come from 8% coverage area. Highly urbanised. So when UMobile launched in 2007, made sense to target where 70% of the revenue was coming from.

• Currently has 1200 node Bs and roaming onto 2G partner network.

• Price is in decline in Malaysia, ARPUS are falling for voice. The market has reached revenue saturation.

• Operators need data centric growth and they need it to be low costs business case. Makes sense to use femtocells. (In Malaysia, smartphones make up 65% of new phone sales)

• Umobile has limited capex, so trialling femtos with Alcatel-Lucent. Using home and hotspot femtos.

• Plan to launch femtos commercially. Will improve indoor coverage, data offload, reducing roaming costs (because they have to pay their 2G partner) and bundled services.

• Malaysian govt has target of 75% BB penetration by 2016.

• “Its a no brainer for us to give away femtos for free”

• However their strategy is somewhat hampered by a local regulation (tax) of around US$600 per cellsite – not really significant for macrocells, but a serious problem for thousands of femtocells.

• Continuous Computing launched their "Femtotality" software product. No longer limited to just the protocol stacks, they've invested an additional 150 man years in their application layer (I believe this figure includes an acquisition, otherwise their 200 staff would have been working a lot of overtime) and now offer SON (Self Optimisation), remote management and configuration features too.

• NTT DoCoMo was able to restore cellular service after the earthquake/tsunami in just 6 weeks after 4,900 cellsites were put out of service in the Tohoku region alone - femtocells were part of the solution. They plan to switch off their 2G service next year and have already launched LTE. They intend to deploy LTE femtocells as soon as possible.

• Finally, Broadcom’s Shlomo Gadot gave a provocative presentation where he outlined a compelling vision for femtocell technology. He sees no reason why Wi-Fi hardware should be cheaper than femto in future, and named integration as a key trend. Following this trend, Shlomo gave more details of the forthcoming integrated WiFi/Femto/ADSL residential gateway, the first of its kind, announced by Ubiquisys earlier that same day.

DAY 2

Dr Alan Law of Vodafone Group talking about femtocells beyond the home.

• Vodafone’s vision started with consumer cells, and great things are happening both at home and abroad with this arm of their femtocell operation. But where do you take femtocells when looking beyond residential?

• Vodafone has been trialling its enterprise and rural cells, and some interesting information emerged when Dr Law recounted some statistics from their rural and enterprise test deployments. The amount of dropped calls noticeably decreased when voice and data was offloaded onto the femtocell – which means better quality of service for Vodafone’s customers. There are still some challenging aspects to rural deployment such as IP transport and power locations, but on the whole results were positive.

• Vodafone’s enterprise femto trials have also been successful, with data services noticeably enhanced in enterprise environments when femtocells were brought into the mix. The company’s ‘Metrozone’ concept would provide extra network capacity for data offload in denser urban areas.

Next there was a fascinating presentation from Rick Vergin, CEO of Mosaic Telecoms. He represents a rural telco, and outlined the problems of serving customer who live predominately in farmland or forest. It is desperate to deploy femtocells to not just plug gaps, but create coverage for the first time. Cellular coverage is the chief concern: macrocells can provide coverage to population centers (towns over 200 people) and microcells can support where people gather regularly (schools, for instance). But thousands live outside this coverage area.

• First problem is geography: most of Mosaic’s customers live towns with 200 people up to a small city with 9000. But the 9000 square mile coverage area within its 3G license, comprises mostly farmland or forest – and potentially 100,000 people.

• Mosaic runs 3G in band IV, a relatively underused part of the spectrum from a global perspective. This has caused unprecedented problems with femtocell vendors, with Airvana, Technicolor and Arcadyan all contracted only to subsequently drop out one at a time. Finally, with the guidance of Nokia Siemens, Ubiquisys was selected.

• Farmland is not so bad, but forest is very challenging for the Mosaic’s 35 macro cell sites. CEO Rick Vergin lives 200m from a main road, and 2 miles from the nearest macro cell. On the road, he has line of site and 4 bar coverage, at home he barely has 1 bar coverage. Many of the potential customers in their licensed area have no coverage.

• The femtos will bring coverage to people with currently little or no coverage. Moscaic has no intention to use femtos to create ubiquitous coverage – that would be way too expensive. But what they can do is give subscribers coverage most of the time: at home, at school, at the cafe. It will only be on the journeys between that they may have no bars.

• The rural customers of Mosaic will also benefit from LTE because it will be used to backhaul the femto traffic and also provide broadband access for the first time (remember many of these properties will be far away from an exchange and may not use satellite or microwave. Mosaic will use the 750MHz LTE for residential broadband access, and bundle VoIP and femto/cellular with it. (750MHz is much more spectrally efficient than its 1700/2100 MHz 3G spectrum).

• This is a great case study for not just the 1000 rural US telco but for any operator that either operates in the rural segment or has universal access obligations.

Peter Agnew of Colt Telecom took to the stage to present his views on what it takes to overcome the barriers to launching a femtocell service through fixed and mobile collaboration. If that sounds like a bit of a mouthful, all will become clearer in a minute!

• Colt Telecom is a large pan-european fixed line operator, working in 21 countries with organisations such as major banks. Peter proposed that in working together with a fixed line operator such as Colt, mobile operators will have an ally in femtocell deployment, aiding connectivity, quality of service and increasing the mobile operator’s access to enterprises.

• In essence, what Peter and Colt are proposing is ‘femto-as-a-service’ (‘FaaS’), which was met with some figurative nods of approval on Twitter. Peter finished his presentation by noting that for something like FaaS to work, self-organising network technology would almost certainly need to play a role in such a deployment.

• It’s an important development for operators wanting to take their first steps in femto, which often starts with the low-risk bit low-volume enterprise route. This solution is the first to remove the barrier of high up-front gateway and integration costs, and the subsequent reliance on volume in the business case.

• Another approach, and its not one that COLT said it would necessarily be offering, is to provide in-building installs (as long as there is not radio planning). It makes sense for a business telco with experience of firewalls, LANs and so on to assist both enterprise and mobile operator in this area.

• In dense metropolitan areas, most subscribers are sitting within an office. It makes sense to bring coverage closer to these users, and not charge the enterprise for this (either for the access points or in-building cabling). It improves the coverage of the enterprise subscribers and for everyone else in the macro – both are sufficient incentives for the mobile operator to foot the bill.

• However, more bandwidth available means more consumed. COLT asks, do mobile operators have the fixed-line infrastructure and core-network to cope with the increase in backhaul requirement?

• Cisco’s Mark Grayson, spoke about mobile offload architectures. One of Mark’s main points that resonated with the Twitter audience following the #FWS11 hashtag was that the cost for networks is dealing with the non-uniform peaks in mobile internet demand.

• In their previous experience with large sporting events like the Superbowl, Cisco noted that the volume of traffic leaving the stadium was greater than the volume entering – all thanks to social media services such as Facebook, YouTube, etc. with people sharing content, something that Intel’s Steve Price raised later on.

• Mark suggested that the move to small cells will require a change in mindset, and put forward a suggestion for using converged Wi-Fi/femto architectures for macro offload of indoor traffic – and he also noted that cellular small cells would need to prove themselves at the high densities already deployed with WiFi.

Ubiquisys’ CTO and Founder Will Franks, with a presentation on the next generation of small cells.

• Will started things off with a brief discussion on the evolution and naming of small cells, describing how things have progressed from early residential femtos, all the way to some of the especially advanced outdoor and rural models.

• The building blocks for the next generation of intelligent small cells, Will stated, are 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi. This, combined with the continuous adaptive behaviour offered by our self-organising network technology, helps Ubiquisys small cells to form part of the recently discussed ‘Edge Cloud’ – something also raised in Intel’s presentation.

• Will went on to describe how small cell hotpots will be deployed in the real world, and broke down small cell technology into layers. Starting with the hardware platform (featuring Texas Instruments’ simultaneous dual-mode 3G/LTE), through continuous self organization and self organizing networks, and on to edge cloud computing platforms (Intel) and cloud control systems.

• Ubiquisys reported that Softbank Japan have been able to deploy rural femtocells in just 3 days using satellite backhaul. Their "self optimising femto grid" even works for clusters of rural femtocells at 2km range.

Competitive operator Network Norway, thinks it has the answer for small businesses in Norway.

• Combine mobile centrex with femtocells. Norway is a country that was at the leading edge of fixed-mobile substitution.

• According to Network Norway, 64% of all calls originate on a mobile and 79% of call minutes terminate on a mobile. This is a very mobile friendly country and, believed Network Norway, businesses would be very receptive to mobile centrex.

• The problem is buildings: all that concrete, glass and basements make ditching the desk phone an impossibility unless you can bring the mobile network indoors. DAS (distributed antennae systems) are too expensive for most small businesses. Femtocells are not.

• Network Norway launched a small business femtocells to make their Mobile Centrex service more compelling. The mobile PaBX service offers hunt groups, stats on attendant function, private number plans, conferencing etc.

• What is interesting to me is that they have built smartphone apps (for Ovi, iPhone and Android) which allows users to set up conferences and see presence/availability in contacts (which comes from femtocells).

• In other nomenclature, this is called “collaboration”. Or even unified communications, if you use the IM, email and SMS functions on your smart phone.

• So benefits for small businesses: flexible communications, collaboration, guaranteed coverage in the office, seamless experience, no capex.

The last presentation day 2 featured Steve Price of Intel, with a look at how to ‘differentiate the small cell user experience with an intelligent, application enabling architecture’.

• The internet and mobile internet are both growing rapidly, with the “Gigabit Generation” particular fixated on social networking, which now has a considerable impact on network traffic at large. Service providers are now presented with a great opportunity, Steve said, as they can now take advantage of the fact that they are directly involved in the process.

• The next step is to make sure that intelligence is present throughout the network – and just as important is its location. These intelligent services ensure that the user will be getting a better experience in the end.

• The two key trends identified by Intel were cloud RAN, with China Mobile named as an example, and edge cloud, where the Intel-Ubiquisys collaboration was given as a prime example.

Femtocell Industry Awards 2011

• Individual Contribution: Tom Lismer

• Residential Femtocell Access Point Design and Technology Innovation: Picochip

• Non-residential femtocell access point design and technology innovation: Alcatel-Lucent

• Femtocell Network element design and technology innovation: ip.access

• Femtocell Application: New service or technology: Alcatel-Lucent

• Progress in commercial deployment: Huawei

• Commercial deployment – Marketing Campaign: Vodafone

• Commercial Deployment – technical implementation: Vodafone

• Contribution to Femtocell Standards: Nokia Siemens Networks

• Enabling Technology: Texas Instrument

• Social Vision: NEC

• Judges Choice: Rakon

Complete Details on Femto Forum Website here.

DAY 3

Surprisingly there wasnt much coverage from Day 3. My observation is that by the third day, the people get really tired and its just the analysts who are still around learning, discussing and participating as much as they can. The only summary I found is from the Think Femtocell blog. Here are few interesting points:

• The femto vendor community seems to be frustrated by the slow rollout of Femtos by the network. The technology has been proven and from what I see, if a network is rolling out Femtos, they are getting good reviews and reception from the user community, even though they may have to shell out a few bucks.

• Verizon reported tremendous success when using their femtocell (the Verizon Wireless Extender) to reduce churn. They've also successfully offloaded heavy users from their macro network in Chicago, by sending them a free femtocell – both improving speeds for those high users as well as releasing capacity on the macro network for others to benefit from. Their femtocell solution works well and they're very happy with it. You still can't buy a femtocell in a Verizon store because It doesn't fit with their corporate branding of having the best network.

• In contrast, Vodafone don't seem to have suffered any loss of brand image by promoting Sure Signal – their network brand remains strong and is arguably strengthened by saying they are the only one who can truly guarantee full service indoors anywhere (assuming there is a DSL line to connect with). Vodafone Ireland jokingly apologised for the lower approval figure than Vodafone Greece during their femtocell trials - only 96% (against 98% in Greece) would recommend them to their friends and family. They explained how they had carefully crafted their marketing message to celebrate the positive aspects of their customer's individual homes (thick woods, stone buildings, basement flats etc.) and how simple it was for them to have 5 bar coverage.

• Comcast have built out a lot of Wi-Fi hotspot capacity in addition to their wireline/cable services. They believe in the long term, the usage mix of traffic on wireless will be a similar profile to wireline today – say 50% entertainment (including video), 20% web surfing; a total of 13GB/month. Comcast has deployed some 5000 WiFi hotspots so far, and plan to build out 100K over the coming years.

Wi-Fi has some new features coming – the new HotSpot 2.0, which Comcast will be trialling later this year. Greater use of the 5GHz spectrum will help reduce congestion in high traffic areas. Sports stadiums seem to be the biggest challenge – many users wanting to watch video at the same time, with others trying to use Mi-Fi (cellular to Wi-Fi adaptors) at the same time/in the same spectrum.

• Contela explained how they use femtocells in Korea to offload data traffic. Unusually, the system deals with voice and data traffic differently – switching voice calls to the normal macro network while handling as much data traffic as possible through femtocells and Wi-Fi.

• TOT, Thailand, a relatively new entrant to mobile explained how they can install femtocells at public payphone booths as a quick way to find sites with backhaul connectivity (using DSL) and power. Getting the height of the unit is important – it needs to be slightly out of reach. They also showed their disaster recovery solution – which uses femtocells + satellite backhaul and can be rapidly deployed. In these situations, providing a fixed/wireline phone service isn't useful – most people now have all their phone numbers held in their mobile phone and not written down. Mesh backhaul, linking clusters of femtocells to each other using wireless and aggregating the backhaul to a few egress points, is also a useful option – a maximum of 5 "hops" using a so-called spine and rib architecture matches urban street layouts.

• Stuart Carlaw from ABI Research. Growing number of employees have more than one phone they use in the office (one corporate + one personal). Both phones have mixed voice/data use. After some retrenchment in 2009, voice has continued to grow and is now 779 minutes average for corporate users. Video and picture messaging are being used by enterprise users (on their corporate liable phone) more than ever before. The growing demands of employees are giving their IT departments a major headache, for which enterprise femtocells will be a major part of the solution.

• The Femtocell Application developers toolkit from Alcatel-Lucent isn't locked into their solution. Applications developed and tested using their SDK should also work with any other femtocell system that also conforms to the Femtocell Application API.

• There were a number of operators present at the conference who are clearly there in an active capacity. Most were pretty tight lipped about their plans, but all seem to acknowledge that femtocells will play some part in the story.

Some Final thoughts from the Ubiquisys Blog.

• The latest Informa femtocell market status report, produced for the Femto Forum this week, confirms the strong growth trend with nine new commercial launches in the past quarter alone.

• Both operators and vendors alike were talking about femto technology being used in public-space small-cell hotspots to provide a capacity boost in high demand areas. At least half of the presentations touched on this topic in one way or another. Is it because the growth in data demand is beginning to be felt? Or is it that the low opex and backhaul costs of femto are making a strong business case? In any case, many of the questions about public space small cells were mentioned, such as interoperability with the macro layer and how the necessary high density deployment of small cells will be achieved. The questions were mentioned, but solutions were not – a sure sign of innovative work in progress.

• Colt Telecom unveiled femtocell infrastructure as a service. Because many operators want to make their first femto launch into a low-risk segment, they often opt for SME (small business) rather than consumer segments. Yet the lower volumes in SME can damage the business case, because the upfront costs of the core gateway and systems integration are shared between fewer customers. By offering an incremental managed service cost, fixed line provider Colt might just have made it easier for mobile operators to start femto services.

• Broadcom unveiled a fully integrated femto residential gateway, Texas Instruments won an award for their powerful new 3G/LTE SoC, and Intel presented a future powered by compute platforms in both cloud RAN and edge cloud environments.

• There was a degree of consensus that LTE will be seen first in small cell hotspots, the same hotspots that need to deal with a deluge of 3G data demand over the next few years. Several speakers mentioned that this calls for small cells that can run 3G and LTE simultaneously, like those new SoCs from TI.

• A few years ago you would have seen quite a few femto vs. Wi-Fi presentations, but no more, which is quite a relief to us, as we have been behind combined femto-Wi-Fi devices since 2008. There was much discussion of harmonisation in home and business environments. In public spaces, the idea of tri-mode small cells replacing Wi-Fi hotspots was raised. These would maintain the Wi-Fi capability, but add 3G and LTE cellular, opening the possibility of using cellular’s invisible “login” to replace Wi-Fi’s usual usernames and passwords.

Sources:

Pics Source - Ubiquisys Blog

Report compiled from:

• Ubiquisys Blog

• Think Femtocell Blog

• Wilson Street Blog

Femtocell Industry Award Winners 2010

Category 1: Residential femtocell access point design and technology innovation

Shortlists:

* Huawei - Huawei Home Media Centre

* Technicolor - TG872 Integrated Femtocell

* Ubiquisys - The G3-mini Femtocell from Ubiquisys/SerComm

Winner:

Huawei - Home Media Centre

“The residential market for femtocells is clearly the driver for attaining mass-market volumes, enabling improved coverage, data offload and new service opportunities. In order to gain traction and consumer acceptance, there need to be persuasive reasons for purchase - and also value-added features to protect against future churn. Huawei's Home Media Center includes a broad set of audiovisual capabilities such as video storage, on top of the femto module, which can help it attain a permanent role in a subscriber's home," agreed the judges.

Category 2: Greater femtocell design and technology innovation

Shortlists:

* SpiderCloud - SpiderCloud wireless enterprise radio access network (E-RAN): solving network operators’ network capacity and in-building coverage problems

* Ubiquisys - Ubiquisys Enterprise Femto Net Solution

* Ubiquisys - Colo-Node HSPA Metro Femtocell

Winner:

Ubiquisys - Colo-Node HSPA Metro Femtocell

“One of the areas of femtocell technology in which there is intense carrier interest is the metrozone, and the potential to make small outdoor cells part of an urban build-out. Ubiquisys has come up with a very early product for this much discussed market, an innovation that brings real world metro femtocells a big step closer to reality,” agreed the judges.

Category 3: Femtocell network element design and technology innovation

Shortlists:

* NEC - Femto-Share

* Nokia Siemens Networks - The most compact and integrated Femto Gateway commercially available

* Tatara - The Tatara Convergence Server Platform

Winner:

NEC - Femto-Share

“No different than in their macro-cell networks, operators are looking for ways to keep the cost of deploying a femtocell in check. While there was no shortage of impressive network innovations submitted for this year’s awards, NEC’s focus on costs combined with standards and scalability – particularly as operators look to launch services across markets – helped its FemtoShare and FemtoCloud offers to stand apart,” agreed the judges.

Category 4: Femtocell application concept

Shortlists:

* Airvana - Airvana’s ‘Femto Family Tablet’

* Argela - Argela's Femtocell Advertising Application

* Tatara - FemtoCloud services enabled by the Tatara Convergence Server Platform

Winner:

Airvana - ‘Femto Family Tablet’

“As the femtocell industry matures and commercial launches multiply, it is increasingly important to develop unique applications to help drive demand for femtocells. The Airvana Femto Family Tablet stands out as a compelling application that could deliver real value to both operators and end-users based on unique femtocell features such as presence," agreed the judges.

Category 5: Progress in commercial deployment

Shortlists:

* NEC - Commercial progress

* picoChip - picoXcell femtocell SoC family

* Ubiquisys - Commercially deployed by SoftBank Mobile and SFR

Winner:

picoChip - picoXcell femtocell SoC family

“picoChip's involvement in such a large portion of the commercial femtocell services today is a clear indication of progress in commercial deployment. The sheer volume of femtocell chips that the vendor has shipped is further evidence of commercial momentum in the market,” agreed the judges.

Category 6: Commercial launch

Shortlists:

* AT&T - AT&T 3G MicroCell National Deployment

* Sprint - Sprint Airave

* Vodafone - Vodafone Sure Signal

Winner:

AT&T - 3G MicroCell National Deployment

“AT&T’s 3G MicroCell deployment with Cisco caught the judges’ eyes for two crucial reasons. First and foremost, it emphasised the importance of the customer at the heart of the femtocell experience, positioning technology very much as an enabler, rather than an end in itself. Secondly, the deployment is on a national scale, which given the US market’s size adds an additional layer of complexity,” agreed the judges.

Category 7: Contribution to femtocell standards

Shortlists:

* Airvana - Airvana Standards Team led by Doug Knisely, VP of technology

* Alcatel Lucent - Martin Warner- A catalyst in driving 3GPP femtocell specifications

* Nokia Siemens Networks - Driver for open standards, in standard setting bodies and realization

Winner:

Airvana - Standards Team led by Doug Knisely, VP of technology

“There have been many outstanding contributions to femtocell standards and selecting one above another proved very difficult for the judges – indeed this was one of the closest categories of all. After much discussion the judges decided that they would prefer the spirit of this award to tend more towards clear individual contributions and on that basis the work of Doug Knisely stood out as being particularly important and demonstrating great dedication over extended periods. The femtocell industry is indeed in his debt,” agreed the judges.

Category 8: Enabling technology

Shortlists:

* Airvana - UMTS Femtocell Beacon

* Continuous Computing & picoChip - The world’s first LTE femtocell reference design

* picoChip - picoXcell™ PC323 - The complete next generation femtocell solution

Winner:

Continuous Computing & picoChip - The world’s first LTE femtocell reference design

“The Continuous Computing and picoChip LTE reference design is a great example of an enabling technology that is necessary to kick start development of LTE femtocells. The timing of this reference design is critical for the introduction of LTE femtocells as operators begin to rollout the first LTE networks. At the same time there is a growing understanding of the importance of multi-tier cellular architectures as we move from 3G to 4G and as networks begin to cope with user demand for capacity. The judges wanted to recognize the role of this crucial component in what is likely to become a necessary part of future 4G networks,” agreed the judges.

Category 9: Judges’ Choice

Shortlists:

* Alcatel Lucent - Wilson Street: Alcatel-Lucent’s wireless technology showcasing smallcells living and working with macrocells for the community of Wilson Street

* Ubiquisys - The World’s First Sub-$100 Femtocell - the G3-mini

* Vodafone - Vodafone Sure Signal

Winner:

Vodafone - Sure Signal

“While we in the industry have known about femtocells for many years, the wider public have been unaware of their existence and benefits. The Vodafone marketing campaign changed all that. In a well-crafted and multi-faceted campaign they showed consumers how they could achieve coverage in their home and changed the role and perception of cellular communications. They have done a great deal to advance the success of femtocells and fully deserve to be recognised for this,” agreed the judges.

Category 10: Individual contribution to Femto Forum activities

Shortlists:

* Joshua Adelson, Airvana

* Gibson Ang, GENBAND

* Gordon Mansfield, AT&T

* Mona Mustapha, Vodafone

* Clare Somerville, picoChip

* Fabio Chiussi, Airvana & Mark Walker, Ubiquisys

Winner:

Gordon Mansfield, AT&T

“The Femto Forum’s work is driven mainly by the efforts of individuals from within our member organisations. From an impressive shortlist, the judging panel selected Gordon Mansfield, Executive Director at AT&T, as the individual who has made the single biggest difference to the progress of the Forum. Gordon has been a major force in developing consensus positions among operators and other stakeholders on a range of femtocell related issues. He has been a regular contributor at Femto Forum plenaries and sponsored conferences, as well as being a tireless promoter of femtocells to the wireless industry as a whole by speaking in support of femtocells at numerous industry events. Besides his own time commitments he has worked to assign the right AT&T individuals to contribute in the working groups and SIGs of the Femto Forum. We are very pleased to be able to recognise his dedication to the worldwide acceptance of femtocell technology through this award,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum.

Category 11: Chairman’s award

Winner:

Karim Sharf, TraC

"Most of the Femto Forum’s work is driven by the efforts of individuals from within our member organisations and a huge number have contributed their time and skills to the Forum in the past year and all deserve my considerable thanks. However, one of our key goals we had in the last year was to make tangible progress towards our vision of an open, interoperable ecosystem for femtocells. To that end, in March we ran the first plugfest for UMTS femtocells, which was widely supported by over 20 vendors. Karim Sharf was instrumental in supporting and coordinating that process and his level of contribution to the Forum's aims has been outstanding,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum.

World Vendor Awards 2010

Winners of the first World Vendor Awards were revealed during a dinner at the UnderGlobe in London on the 5 May 2010.

Outstanding Vendor of the Year

Open to

All hardware and software vendors and OEMs who are able to demonstrate organisational scale, strategy and procedures of a truly global standard.

About this category

The winner in this category will demonstrate outstanding innovation backed by quality of service, reliability, and sales support. It is most likely that the winner will offer a strong portfolio of products and solutions, and will be able to demonstrate evidence of strong and disciplined management providing a sound business footing, and strategic direction and future scope for development of the company.

Criteria

Entrants for Outstanding Vendor will be judged on the degree to which they fulfil the following conditions:

Address customer needs in terms of quality, reliability and customer service

Provide strong and innovative product and/or solution offerings

Show sound management, clear strategic direction and strong performance

Demonstrate revenue generation/growth.

What features make your operation stand out from the competition? How have you responded to customer and/or market changes?

Winner: Huawei Technologies

Other Nominees:

BroadSoft

Intec Telecoms Systems

Highly Commended: Juniper Networks

Oracle Communications

Best Specialist Vendor

Open to

All hardware and software vendors and OEMs specialising in provision of a particular product, solution or group of solutions. The Best Specialist Vendor may be a division of a larger company, but must be able to demonstrate their autonomy as a specialist in their own right.

About this category

The winner in this category will demonstrate how their products and solutions address the needs of a specific part of the telecom market and how their foresight and innovation is improving business for their customers.

Criteria

The winning company must have been offering commercially available products prior to the closing date for the award entries. The judges will be looking for evidence of:

Innovation

How easy it is to implement and customer ?

What are the benefits to the users

Value for money

Features that stand out from competitors

Evidence of customer satisfaction e.g. testimonials

Winner: ip.access

Highly Commended: Ipanema Technologies

Other Nominees:

Mformation

RAD

Telmap

Best Mobile Device

Open to

Manufacturers and vendors of all mobile devices, including but not limited to handsets, PDA’s, and netbooks.

About this category

The judges will be looking for the device that has in their opinion best combined innovation and usability to create a mobile device that provides the greatest benefit to the intended users, whether business or consumer.

Criteria

The device must have been commercially available prior to the closing date for the award entries

The judges will be looking for evidence of:

How easy is it to use and implement?

What are the benefits to the users

Value for money

Evidence of customer satisfaction e.g. testimonials

Winner: Apple iPhone/ iPhone 3G

Other Nominees:

BlackBerry BOLD

HTC Hero

Motorola DROID

Nokia E71

Best Brand Campaign

Open to

All hardware and software vendors, OEM’s, device manufacturers, outsourcing companies, systems integrators.

About this category

This category will recognise the organisation that has created the most effective and compelling brand campaign for its products or services in one or more branches of the media. This may be through a single campaign or series of campaigns. Only in this category can supporting material be accepted, in the form of printed or audio/visual material from the campaign, for review by the judging panel. Please email supporting material to vendorawards@totaltele.com.

Criteria

The campaign must have run or be running during the calendar year 2009.

Entrants should provide details of:

Reason for the campaign(s)

The rationale behind choice of media, company or service name/ slogan, etc

Scope and target audience

Stated business objectives behind the campaign

Raised brand awareness and positive impact on market share, valuation or bottom line.

Winner: Juniper Networks

Best Outsourcing Initiative

Open to

This category is open both to dedicated outsourcing companies and to vendors, consultants and integrators running outsourcing initiatives.

About this category

It covers all forms of outsourcing initiative, including BPO, IT outsourcing and network outsourcing, and the winner will be the organisation that can demonstrate an initiative best delivering its planned benefits, whether these be cost saving, skill improvement, or resource release. The judges will be particularly looking for evidence of innovation that has delivered tangible benefits.

Criteria

The campaign must have been initiated or have delivered its first measurable results during calendar year 2009. In addition to evidence of innovation, judges will seek to understand what the key project objectives were, how successfully the project was implemented and how success is being measured. Credit will be given for being able to supply independent testimonials supporting project success or process improvement.

Winner: Comviva Technologies

Other Nominees:

Firstsource Solutions

Huawei Technologies

Infosys BPO

ITS

Clean Technology Initiative

Open to

All Vendors, OEMs, integrators and consultants

About this category

This category seeks to reward the company that has best reduced the environmental impact of telecommunication services through its products and solutions or utilisation of products and solutions. The judges will be seeking evidence of eco-friendly products, innovations, and specific programmes or initiatives.

Criteria

Entrants should be able to demonstrate:

Evidence improved energy efficiency, alternative energy sources, recycling, conservation, manufacturing and logistics cost reduction and eco-friendly consumption.

A measurable programme, delivering against and reaching set targets for improvement.

Future plans to continue to address corporate, social & environmental issues

How your clean technology programme has benefited stakeholders including customers/end users, employees, and the wider public.

Winner: Eltek Valere

Other Nominees:

ADTRAN

Huawei Technologies

Technology Foresight

Open to

All equipment vendors, OEM’s and developers of software solutions, as well as outsourcing companies and integrators that have deployed or trialled a new technology by an operator, service provider, or enterprise telecom customer.

About this category

This award will go to the individual or organisation that has shown the greatest foresight in developing or fostering the development of a technology used or able to be used in delivering or receiving communications services via carrier networks.

Criteria

Entrants should be able to demonstrate:

The development of a technology with potential for far reaching effect on business or consumer markets

That the technology and/or its application are the original work of the entrant, and that they are not simply implementing another company’s technology.

That it represents an innovative approach to an existing aspect of communications networks or services, or opens up an entirely new area

That the technology works and has potential in a commercial environment.

What revenues do you expect your technology to produce? How do you intend to grow revenues and/or business from your technology or product over the next three years?

Winner: SpiderCloud Wireless

Highly Commended: Huawei Technologies

Other Nominees:

Juniper Networks

Evolving Systems

ECI Telecom

Best Software Solution

Open to

Software vendors and developers, as well as integrators providing software solutions.

About this category

The judges will be looking for an organisation that is providing or utilising a predominantly software driven solution. This could be in any part of the telecom sphere, including using software in place of hardware upgrades, or a traditionally software driven solution such as billing, network management etc.

Criteria

Entrants should be able to demonstrate why their solution is the most appropriate for the problem addressed, the commercial performance/cost savings brought by the solution, and highlight innovations brought to the sector. Customer testimonials should illustrate the degree of satisfaction delivered by the solution.

Winner: Comviva Technologies

Other nominees:

cVidya Networks

Juniper Networks

Nokia Siemens Networks

Novarra

Sybase

Technologist of the Year

This will be a public vote looking for the CTO, IT Director or senior technology leader of a telecom software or hardware vendor who has demonstrated outstanding vision in driving forward the organisations product and solution offerings, innovations and realising the potential to turn research into commercially successful products.

The Total Telecom team will seek nominations from the industry of senior technology leaders who are perceived as driving change, innovation and success in the industry, as a shortlist of which will be put to the public vote.

Winner: Thierry Klein, Founder and CTO, Alzette Venture Alcatel Lucent

Other Nominees:

Rupert Baines, VP Marketing, picoChip

Ajay Bhatt, Architect, Intel

Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO, RIM

Antonio Nucci, CTO Narus, Inc.

Best Support System

Open to

All vendors of support systems, including, but not limited to Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS)

About this category

The judges will be looking for the support system that has created the greatest service improvement, cost saving, or enabled the greatest increase in business income. They will be seeking product innovation, ease of use and application, and delivery of customer satisfaction.

Criteria

The support system should have been in operation during 2009 and the entrant should be able to demonstrate

How has your product or application improved customer satisfaction levels?

Provide evidence of improved customer acquisition or retention levels?

That the solution is simple to operate and easy to understand with good customer training and support

That the solution is scalable and flexible, that it can cater for new service delivery platforms, service combinations and business models.

Winner: Comptel Corporation

Highly Commended: Aito Technologies

Other Nominees:

Martin Dawes Systems

Sigma Systems

More about the World Vendor Awards here.

Informa LTE Awards 2010 at the LTE World Summit

Last year I covered the Femto Forum Awards at the Femtocells World Summit and have in past also covered the LTE World Summit in quite details. This year I will again be attending the LTE World summit and will hopefully be able to cover the LTE Awards in detail.

The awards will be for following categories:

• Best Network/Device Testing Product for LTE
• Best Contribution to LTE Standards (Individual or Company)
• Significant Progress for a Commercial Launch of LTE by an Operator
• Significant Progress for a Commercial Launch of LTE by a Vendor
• Best Enabling Product/Technology for LTE (components, subsystems etc)
• Best Contribution to Research & Development for LTE
• Best Green LTE Product or Initiative
• Award for Individual Contribution to LTE Development

To enter, visit www.lteawards.com Choose the category/ies you would like to enter and put together the supporting materials – full details available on the website. Submit your entry/ies by 26th February 2010.

Brochure available here.

Femto Forum Awards 2009: Winners and Losers

The Femto Forum, Femtocells award for 2009 were announced at a dinner on Wednesday,24th of June. Here are the names of the finalists and the winners:


1. Femtocell or femtocell network element design and technology innovation
• Bewan Systems - Femtocell residential gateway
• ip.access Ltd - nano3G
• Motorola Inc - Digital picture frame
Winner: ip.access Ltd - nano3G Enterprise Solution.

The nano3G represents an evolution of the femtocell into the enterprise environment. Not only does it support the 3GPP's new femtocell standard, it also represents a step up in coverage and capacity.

2. Femtocell service (commercial, prototype or demo)
• ip.access Ltd - Facebook virtual fridge notes
• Softbank Mobile Corp - IMS-based Femto trial
• Ubiquisys Ltd - Podcast sync
Winner: ip.access Ltd - Facebook virtual fridge notes.

The service implements a "classic" application use case - where the subscriber receives a reminder message when arriving at home - but with an innovative extension that enables the message to be composed and sent using Facebook.

3. Progress in commercial deployment (vendor or ecosystem)
• NEC Corporation - Commercial contracts and live trials
• Softbank Mobile Corp - Metro area trial
• Starent Networks/Airwalk Communications/Cellcom/Mavenir Systems - Multi-vendor femtocell solution
Winner: NEC Corporation

This recognizes NEC's strong traction in the market with several commercial contracts in place and several live trials underway with operators around the world.

4. Significant progress or commercial launch by a large carrier
• Softbank Mobile Corp - Launch
• Sprint Nextel Corp - Launch
• Vodafone Group Services Ltd - Trial
Winner: Sprint Nextel Corp.

This recognizes this commercial launch, which was the world's first commercial deployment of femtocells.

5. Significant progress or commercial launch by a small carrier
• Cellcom - Launch
• Chungwa Telecom Co Ltd - Launch
Winner: Cellcom.

For Cellcom’s deployment of the world's first IMS-based CDMA femtocell network for consumers and enterprises.

6. Contribution to femtocell standards (individual or company)
• Alcatel Lucent - General contribution to femtocell standards
• Nokia Siemens Networks - General contribution to 3GPP femtocell standard
• Taka Yoshizawa - Contribution to femtocell management standardisation
Winner: Taka Yoshizawa, Thomson

For his pivotal role in defining the femtocell management specifications by working through the Femto Forum, the Broadband Forum and the 3GPP.

7. Enabling technology (components, subsystems, modules etc.)
• Epitiro - Femtocell test suite
• Kineto Wireless Inc - Femtocell gateway controller
• picoChip Designs Ltd - Optimized system-on-chip solution
Winner: picoChip Designs Ltd -picoXcell™ PC302 SoC.

This optimized system-on-chip, which supports the 3GPP's new femtocell standard, embodies five years of femtocell experience, comprehensive interoperability testing and numerous real-world deployments.

8. Social vision - use of femtocells for social / economic / environmental development
• Alcatel Lucent - Consumer research into femtocell usage patterns
• Sagem Communications - Ecodesign
• Softbank Mobile Corp - Niimi project
Winner: Softbank Mobile Corp - Niimi project.

The project illustrates how femtocells can be cost-effectively deployed to deliver services in rural environments where existing coverage is limited.

9. Award for individual contributions to Femto Forum activities
• Chris Cox of ip.access - For coordinating the FemtoZone at Mobile World Congress
• Chris Fenton of Telefonica-O2 - For achieving architectural consensus in the Network & Interoperability working group
• Taka Yoshizawa of Thomson - For leading the Management subgroup to completion of TR-196
• Aya Mukaikubo of Softbank Mobile - For wide-ranging contributions to the Marketing & Promotion and Regulatory Working Groups as well as the Services Special Interest Group
• Dave Nowicki of Airvana - For leading the business case modeling work to an outstanding conclusion
• Alan Law of Vodafone & Chris Smart of picoChip – For coordinating the interference management white paper.
Winner: Chris Fenton of Telefónica-O2

For achieving architectural consensus as chair of the Femto Forum Network & Interoperability Working Group.

“The judges were extremely impressed by the high quality and number of award submissions which reflect the health and innovation of the femtocell industry,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum. “The femtocell industry is rapidly evolving as major advances are made in the technology, standards, services and applications - these awards recognise and reward this progress. Our congratulations to the winners and to all those who participated.”

The awards were open to the whole industry and were judged independently of the Femto Forum by a panel of distinguished analysts, journalists and industry experts, chaired by Professor William Webb, Head of R&D at Ofcom.

The judging panel comprised:
• Chairman of the judging panel: Prof. William Webb - Head of R&D - Ofcom
• Dean Bubley - Director - Disruptive Analysis
• Michelle Donegan - European Editor - Unstrung
• Caroline Gabriel - Head of Research - Rethink Wireless
• Peter Jarich - Research Director - Current Analysis
• Aditya Kaul - Senior Analyst, Mobile Networks - ABI Research
• Phil Marshall - Senior Research Fellow, Technology Research - Yankee Group
• Mike Roberts – Principal Analyst, Informa Telecoms & Media
• Sam Samra - Senior Director, Technical Programs - CDMA Development Group
• Adrian Scrase - Vice-President - 3GPP

Anritsu's LTE Tester MD8430A is a winner

Anritsu Company announces its MD8430A Signalling Tester was the only test instrument to win a prestigious CTIA Emerging Technology (E-Tech) Award, announced during the International CTIA WIRELESSS® 2009 show in Las Vegas. The MD8430A, the industry’s first LTE base station simulator, earned a second prize in the 4G - Service Creation & Development category of the E-Tech Awards, which recognize the finest wireless products and services.

“We are thrilled and honored to have won a CTIA E-Tech award because it signifies the best and brightest technologies in the wireless market. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the voting and supported the MD8430A,” said Wade Hulon, Vice President and General Manager of Anritsu Company, Americas Sales Region. “The MD8430A is being used by LTE chipset manufacturers to ensure the quality of their products, speed time to market, and reduce design and production test costs.”

Approximately 300 entries were received for this year’s E-Tech Awards. They were reviewed by a panel of 30 recognized members of the media, industry analysts and executives who selected finalists based on innovation, functionality, technological importance, implementation and overall “wow” factor. More than 40,000 wireless professionals voted on the finalists to determine the winners in 18 categories.

The MD8430A is a highly accurate cost-effective solution for manufacturers of LTE chipsets and mobile devices to evaluate their products and improve time to market. Developed in conjunction with leading chipset manufacturers, the MD8430A augments Anritsu’s broad 3GPP test suite, providing developers of wireless devices and systems with a single-source test solution company.

The MD8430A is designed with 4 RF units that enable 2x2 MIMO system handover tests in a simulated network environment. The base station simulator can conduct end-to-end testing at downlink speeds up to 150 Mbps and uplink speeds up to 50 Mbps. All critical 3GPP air-interface LTE protocol tests, including baseband coding/decoding processing tests; protocol sequence tests, such as position registration, origination, termination, handover, terminal and network disconnect tests; and application tests, are supported. Powerful L1/L2 cache analysis functions are provided as well.