By Telecom Lead Team: The Femto Forum, an
independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell
deployment, announced strong uptake of small cell LTE APIs, including the first
deployment.
Femto Forum
claimed that the vendor community is rapidly preparing the technology to meet
the operator demand. Seventeen manufacturers have adopted the APIs for their
upcoming LTE products including Airvana, AirWalk Communications, Broadcom,
Cisco, Freescale, ip.access, mimoOn , Mindspeed, Picochip, Radisys, Tata Elxsi,
Texas Instruments and Ubiquisys amongst others.
Additionally,
SK Telecom has also implemented the APIs in its LTE femtocell deployment. The
LTE APIs enable interoperability between LTE femtocell semiconductors and
protocol software from different vendors.
This rapid
adoption is being driven by widespread LTE small cell commitments from
operators including China Mobile, Vodafone, SK Telecom and NTT DoCoMo.
According to
a survey from Informa Telecoms & Media, 60 percent of operators believe
small cells are more important than macrocells in LTE deployments. Small cells
were also the comfortable winner in a Rethink Research survey of the most
important features for LTE-Advanced.
As
operators plan LTE networks, small cells, including femtocells, could play a
critical role in enabling the fastest possible data services in metropolitan
and rural public spaces, as well as in private homes and offices,” said Alan
Law, chairman of the Femto Forum’s LTE SIG.
Where small
cells once comprised a telecoms niche, they are now at the epicenter of mobile
broadband thinking. The quick uptake of the Forum’s LTE API is further
testament to this fact – vendors up and down the value chain are adopting the
API to give themselves a time-to-market advantage and the ability to select
best-in-class software and hardware – which don’t always come from the same
source,” said Nick Johnson, CTO of ip.access and chair of the Femto Forum’s
Radio and Physical Layer Working Group, whose members originated the LTE API.
By enabling
interoperability between different products, the Forum’s LTE APIs help create a
more competitive marketplace by ensuring that small cell device manufacturers
can cost-effectively source these critical components from multiple suppliers
while also maximizing the market for semiconductor manufacturers.
