Panel Session on Small Cells (Femtocells) from Cambridge Wireless SIG event

Panel Session on Small Cells (Femtocells) from Cambridge Wireless SIG event from Zahid Ghadialy on Vimeo.

From the Cambridge Wireless Small Cell Special Interest Group event

“Small Cells: the beginning and where we are now”

15 September 2011

At The IET, Savoy Place, London, WC2R 0BL

Panel Session

Chair: Mike Bowerman, Account Manager, Alcatel Lucent.

Participants (from Left to right):

Professor Will Stewart, IET

Houston Spencer, VP Solutions and Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent

Will Franks, CTO and Founder, Ubiquisys

Chris Cox, Director of Marketing, ip.access

More details about the speakers and the event available at: http://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/Agenda/SCS1_15.09.11.pdf

Summary from the 'Small Cells' Event in Cambridge Wireless

We recently had our first 'Small Cells' SIG event in Cambridge Wireless entitled 'Small Cells: The beginning and where we are now'. The following presentation is the Introduction to Cambridge wireless and the 'Small Cells' SIG (special interest group).

Introduction to Cambridge Wireless and the 'Small Cells' SIG

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Embedded below are the slides and the videos that were taken by our host for the day, 'The IET'.

The first presentation was by Prof. Will Stewart of The IET entitled 'Small Cells - Why small cells?'.

Slides Available here. Video podcast here.

Next presentation: 'Small Cells - the big brother of femtocells. Why they are needed, and where is the femtocell market that they build on' by Will Franks, Ubiquisys

Slides available here. Video podcast here.

Next Presentation: 'Small Cells - On the origin of Small Cells by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured providers in the struggle for mobile broadband' by Houston Spencer, Alcatel-Lucent

Slides available here. Video podcast here.

Final Presentation: 'Small Cells - Mass scale femtocell deployments' by Chris Cox, IP.Access

Slides available here. Video podcast here.

Overall it was a good event. The main complaint was that people had lots of questions but didnt get to ask them. Hopefully they will ask them in the future events.

Interference Management in Femto/Small Cell and Macro Environments

Interference Management in Femto/Small Cell and Macro Environments

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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

Presentation on use of Femtocells to test UMTS Security

Femtocells : Inexpensive devices to test UMTS security

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy

More presentations on this topic are available from Institut für Softwaretechnik und Theoretische Informatik.

Wilson Street: What can femtocells do - the next big thing!

I have blogged about the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Femtocells in the past. Few months back I posted about their shift from using the term Femtocells to Small cells. To make everyone aware of this small cells they launched their Wilson Street experiment and are now producing some episodes to show how these small cells can play big part in everyday life.

The first two episodes are embedded below from Youtube.

The latest (3rd) episode is available on the Wilson Street Website here.

The Innovation Driving Femto-powered Small Cells

Intelligence: the Innovation Driving Femto-powered 
Small Cells

View more presentations from Ubiquisys Femtocell.

Slideshow as presented by Richard Staveley from Ubiquisys at Femtocell Americas 2010.

What are Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets)?

HetNets are hot. I hear about them in various contexts. Its difficult to find exactly what they are and how they will work though. There is a HetNets special issue in IEEE Communications Magazine coming out next year but that's far away.

I found an interesting summary on HetNets in Motorola Ezine that is reproduced below:

“The bigger the cell site, the less capacity per person you have,” said Peter Jarich, research director with market intelligence firm Current Analysis. “If you shrink coverage to a couple of blocks, you are having that capacity shared with a fewer number of people, resulting in higher capacity and faster data speeds.”

This is a topic the international standards body, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), has been focusing on to make small cells part of the overall cellular network architecture.

“What we’re seeing is a natural progression of how the industry is going to be addressing some of these capacity concerns,” said Joe Pedziwiatr, network systems architect with Motorola. “There is a need to address the next step of capacity and coverage by introducing and embracing the concepts of small cells and even looking at further advances such as better use of the spectrum itself.”

As such, discussion regarding this small-cell concept has emerged into what is called heterogeneous networks, or Het-Net, for short. The idea is to have a macro wireless network cooperating with intelligent pico cells deployed by operators to work together within the macro network and significantly improve coverage and augment overall network capacity. Small cells can also be leveraged to improve coverage and deliver capacity inside buildings. Indoor coverage has long been the bane of mobile operators. Some mobile operators are already leveraging this concept, augmenting their cellular service offering with WiFi access to their subscriber base in order to address the in-building coverage and capacity challenges facing today’s cellular solutions.

Pedziwiatr said this Het-Net structure goes far beyond what is envisioned for femtocells or standard pico cells for that matter. Introducing a pico cell into the macro network will address but just one aspect of network congestion, namely air interface congestion. The backhaul transport network may become the next bottleneck. Finally, if all this traffic hits the core network, the congestion will just have shifted from the edge to the core.

“This requires a system focus across all aspects of planning and engineering,” Pedziwiatr said. “We’re trying to say it goes beyond that of a femto. If someone shows up at an operator and presents a pico cell, that is just one percent of what would be needed to provide true capacity relief for the macro network.”

Femtocells, otherwise known as miniature take-home base stations, are obtained by end users and plugged into a home or office broadband connection to boost network signals inside buildings. A handful of 3G operators worldwide are selling femtocells as a network coverage play. For the LTE market, the Femtocell Forum is working to convince operators of the value of a femtocell when it comes to better signal penetration inside buildings and delivering high-bandwidth services without loading the mobile network. This is possible, because the backhaul traffic runs over the fixed line connection. However, this femtocell proposition largely relies on end user uptake of them—not necessarily where operators need them, unless they install femtocells themselves or give end users incentives to acquire them.

As with any new concept, there are challenges to overcome before Het-Nets can become reality. Het-Nets must come to market with a total cost of ownership that is competitive for an operator to realize the benefit of providing better capacity, higher data speeds, and most of all, a better end-user experience said Chevli.

“The level of total cost of ownership has to be reduced. That is where the challenge is for vendors to ensure that any new solution revalidates every existing tenet of cellular topology and evolve it to the new paradigm being proposed,” Chevli said. “You can’t increase the number of end nodes by 25X and expect to operate or manage this new network with legacy O&M paradigms and a legacy backhaul approach.”

One of the issues is dealing with interference and Het-Net network traffic policies. “How do you manage all of these small cell networks within the macrocell network?” asked Jarich. “Right now if you have a bunch of femtocells inside a house, there is this concept that the walls stop the macrocell signals from getting in and out. You get a separation between the two. Go outdoors with small cells underlying bigger cells and you get a lot more interference and hand-off issues because devices will switch back and forth based on where the stronger signal is.”

Pedziwiatr said for a Het-Net to work, it would require a change in node management, whereby an operator isn’t burdened with managing big clusters of small cells on an individual basis. “We see elements of SON (self organizing networks), self discovery and auto optimization that will have to be key ingredients in these networks. Otherwise operators can’t manage them and the business case will be a lot less attractive,” he said.

Fortunately, the industry has already been working with and implementing concepts of SON in LTE network solutions. In the femtocell arena also, vendors have been incorporating some elements and concepts of SON so that installing them is a plug-and-play action that automatically configures the device and avoids interference. But even then, Het-Nets will require further SON enhancement to deal with new use cases, such as overlay (macro deployment) to underlay (pico deployments) mobility optimization.

When it comes to LTE, SON features are built into the standard, and are designed to offer the dual benefit of reducing operating costs while optimizing performance. SONs will do this by automating many of the manual processes used when deploying a network to reduce costs and help operators commercialize their new services faster. SON will also automate many routine, repetitive tasks involved in day-to-day network operations and management such as neighbor list discovery and management.

Other key sticking points are deployment and backhaul costs. If operators are to deploy many small cells in a given area, deploying them and backhauling their traffic should not become monumental tasks.

Chevli and Pedziwiatr envision Het-Nets being deployed initially in hot zone areas – where data traffic is the highest – using street-level plug-and-play nodes that can be easily installed by people with little technical know-how.

“Today, macro site selection, engineering, propagation analysis, rollout and optimization are long and expensive processes, which must change so that installers keep inventories of these units in their trucks, making rollout simple installations and power-ups,” said Pedziwiatr. “These will be maintained at a minimum with quick optimization.”

The notion of backhauling traffic coming from a large cluster of Het-Net nodes could also stymie Het-Nets altogether. Chevli said that in order to keep costs down, Het-Net backhaul needs to be a mix of cost-effective wireless or wired backhaul technology to aggregate traffic from what likely will be nodes sitting on lamp posts, walls, in-building and other similar structures. The goal then is to find a backhaul point of presence to aggregate the traffic and then put that traffic on an open transport network in the area.

Backhaul cost reductions may also be a matter of finding ways to reduce the amount of backhaul forwarded to the core network, Pedziwiatr said. These types of solutions are already being developed in the 3G world to cope with the massive data traffic that is beginning to crush networks. For traffic such as Internet traffic, which doesn’t need to travel through an operator’s core network, offloading that traffic as close to the source as possible would further drive down the cost of operation through the reduction of backhaul and capacity needs of the core network.

In the end, with operators incorporating smaller cells as an underlay to their macro network layer rather than relying on data offloading techniques such as femtocells and WiFi that largely depend on the actions of subscribers and impacted by the surrounding cell operating in the same unlicensed frequency, Het-Nets in licensed spectrum will soon become the keystone in attacking the ever-present congestion issue that widely plagues big cities and this is only likely to get worse over time.

Image Source: Dr. Daichi Imamura, Panasonic presentation.

Bell Labs Ireland research on small cells

Bell Labs Ireland research on small cells [Davide Cherubini]

View more presentations from Keith.

Femtocells: Not merely for providing 3G without base stations

Interesting presentation from Argela

Femtocells: Not merely for providing 3G without base stations.

View more presentations from Zahid Ghadialy.

Argela, one of the leading global telecom solution providers, was an exhibitor, speaker and sponsor of the Femtocell World Summit in London which is billed to be the largest Femtocell focused event in the industry for 2010. In addition, Argela’s Femtocell Committee Advertising Application was shortlisted and recognized by the Femto Forum Awards Panel for its innovative application of the Femtocell technology.

During the event, Argela exhibited its Femtocell and Home Gateway products in addition to demonstrating its Femtocell Advertising Application. Oguz Oktay, VP of Sales, commented, “The Femtocell World Summit provides a venue for key players to discuss the latest developments in the Femtocell industry which is why we decided to be a sponsor of the event. Having our Femtocell Advertising Application shortlisted and recognized for its innovation was a very nice bonus for us. We have received a lot of interest in our Femtocell Advertising Application which provides yet another way for service providers to increase the return on their Femtocell investment.”

Argela’s Director of Technology and Research, Dr. Mustafa Ergen, was a speaker during the three day event and he presented how Femtocells are capable of going beyond just providing 3G services.

To download and view Dr. Ergen’s presentation, “Femtocells: Not Merely for Providing 3G without Base Stations,” please click here.

'Femtocells' or 'Small cells' ?

Recently, while browsing, I ended up on Wilson Street. I have been noticing it since earlier this year that Alcatel-Lucent have rebranded their Femtocells as Small-cells. I have blogged earlier about Femtocell variations but the term 'small cell' could be used to cover different sizes and capacity of cells.

Here are some interesting things i found from a recent ABI research blog:

• Indoor residential grade Femtocells have an output power of 10mW-100mW.
• Enterprise grade or Metro femtocells have an output power of 200-300mW.
• Rural femtocells (a.k.a. Super Femtocells, Greater Femtocells) 200mW-1W. Some people refer to them as picocells as well.
• Compact base stations use femtocell silicon efficiencies and multi-core chipset platforms to build a base station on a SoC - but are meant to be higher output power base stations (1W and higher).
• Compact base stations are scalable platforms, which can fit into picocell, microcell or even macrocell form factors. The emergence of compact base station can be traced to the need for multifrequency, multimode, low power consumption, low-cost, pizza-box type base station platforms that can de deployed within different site classifications especially in metro metrozone overlays.
• The capacity crunch in networks is likely to drive operators to deploy compact base stations as in-fills initially with compact base stations being a part of future network blueprints. Current microcell or macrocell platforms are too bulky or costly to deploy in clusters and in large numbers. Compact base stations are also meant to take advantage of backhaul relay techniques making it easier to deploy in small clusters.
• Small cells on the other hand could be the umbrella under which compact base stations (portion of), picocells, microcells, residential, enterprise, rural/metro femtocells exist.
• We are already seeing vendors like Alcatel Lucent change their marketing message from femtocells to ‘small cells’ covering a wider range of products and deployment types. They have also included features like SON and value-added applications into the small cell base category.

To avoid confusing the end users who are just interested in better coverage and data rates, it would make sense to brand the Femtocell as something approprite (like Vodafone has done for Sure Signal). Small cells do sound good too.

Ubiquisys and PicoChip Interviews at Femtocell World Summit

Courtesy: David Chambers, ThinkFemtocell.com

Femtocells data cap and offload dilemma

I recently heard Prof. Simon Saunders (who has a much impressive background that i thought of) at Cambridge Wireless International conference speaking on Thinking Networks.

One of the things mentioned that struck me is how convenient it would be with femtocells to offload the data on the internet directly without going through the operators core. This would mean less data on the backhaul for the operators and since data would have to travel through less nodes, the speed and reliability could be higher.

There is a slight problem though. In the recently concluded Femtocells World Summit (which I have blogged a lot about), AT&T has been harping about its data caps while using Femto. AT&T wants that the Femto's should mainly be used for voice and for data the users should generally switch to using WiFi. Their reasoning is based on the fact that they are not allowed to perform data offload as mentioned above due to FCC regulations. In fact the same problem may be present in other countries and would hamper the Femto growth in time.

Femtocells are better for data usage as I have mentioned in past because they provide seamless coverage and better data security. It should also be pointed out that the battery drains faster when using WiFi as compared to the mobile Internet.

When a user uses Femtocell, he is already using his broadband data allowance and if there is additional restriction placed in terms of data caps on the Femtocell, the users may just revolt and avoid using Femtocells at all.

Voice coverage advantage is good but users may prefer to switch operators if its just voice that they are using Femtos for. While the use of fixed line phones have decreased in the past (thanks to voice bundles on mobile), some users are switching back to using landlines because of the voice clarity and no reception problems.

The Femto manufacturers and the operators will have to act fast if they want their future predictions to come true.

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.

Round up of the Femtocells World Summit 2010

David Chambers of Think Femtocell has provided an excellent summary of the Femtocell World Summit 2010 that concluded today. Please follow the links below to read more:

Day 1 Roundup

Day 2 Roundup

Day 3 Roundup

If interested, you can check the complete programme here.

NTT DoCoMo for LTE Femtocells next year

Its been nearly couple of years since I blogged about starting LTE with femtocells initially and then moving onto Macro network. It had initial momentum but didnt take off for one reason or another. In the ongoing Femtocells World Summit, Yoshiyuki Yasuda, NTT DoCoMo's managing director said that they plan to roll out LTE Femtocells next year mainly to fill the coverage gaps in the LTE Network they will be rolling out later this year.

Those who read this blog regularly would have noticed my recent post about NTT DoCOMo's LTE initiatives here. I have also been promoting LTE femtocells idea as can be seen in my blogs here, here and here. My belief is that femtocells could be very valuable to iron out the problems present in devices, networks or the technology. Also they provide seamless coverage and offer better data security.

Light Reading has interesting analysis on this topic:

Which vendors can serve up the LTE femtos in time? NEC Corp., which is already one of DoCoMo's LTE vendors, has revealed plans for an LTE home base station that will be available for friendly user trials at the end of 2011, and a commercial product is expected in 2012.

Other vendors that are involved in DoCoMo's LTE rollout that could have a shot at meeting the carrier's next-gen femto demands are Fujitsu Ltd., Ericsson AB, and Nokia Siemens Networks, and Stoke Inc. , which supplies an LTE base station aggregation gateway to the Japanese operator.

DoCoMo's current femto vendor is Mitsubishi, which supplies little 3G home base stations to DoCoMo for its MyArea service that launched in November 2009.

DoCoMo's Yasuda said that when the carrier wants to deploy LTE femtos in the 2011-2012 timeframe, it will have deployed 1,500 LTE macrocell base stations during 2010 and 2011. By 2013, it plans to cover 30 percent of the population with LTE. By 2014, DoCoMo plans to cover 70 percent of the population with 15,000 LTE base stations.

Small cells and Wireless Capacity Growth

Self explanatory slide showing the impact of Small cells on the capacity growth. This is probably the best way to further increase the capacity.

Courtesy: Moray Rumney, Agilent technologies in LTE World Summit