Is NSN looking to leave its femto 'partners' behind?

An article from DigiTimes today confirms that Nokia Siemens Networks is in talks with several Taiwan-based manufacturers over plans for joint production of femtocells.

NSN has already signed agreements with Ubiquisys, RadioFrame, Thomson and Airvana for femtocell access points. Yet the article quotes NSN general manager for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Mike Wang, who confirms the company is now in talks with ‘other network equipment makers, including Gemtek Technology and Accton Technology.’

Why would NSN need to source their own femtocells? They have signed up four independent femtocell access point vendors. Why sign up Gemtek and Accton too?

Maybe NSN is getting ready to leave its partners behind.

[UPDATE: In feedback from this blog post, I received word that NSN is rumored to be courting femtocell silicon vendors directly, lending credibility to the idea that they are looking to develop their own femtocell.]

Four Out of Five Agree: UMA for Femtocells

Before MWC, I wrote about the incredible amount of UMA-based femtocell news, calling it a ‘femto frenzy’ of activity.

Within the world of femtocells, there are a chosen few committed to the existing 3GPP UMA/GAN standard. All of the other systems/solutions are proprietary. The “UMA-enabled Femtocell” world consists of many key players:

- Solution provider NEC
- Solution provider Motorola
- Femtocell provider Ubiquisys
- Femtocell provider Motorola
- Femtocell provider Netgear

So, let’s count the number of announced operator femtocell trials and see where UMA is involved:

1. During MWC, pan-European mobile operator O2 announced they were conducting a femtocell trial with NEC.

2. Also during MWC, Scandinavian provider Telia announced a femtocell trial based with Motorola.

3. Then just this week, an article from Fierce Wireless editor Brian Dolan suggests that T-Mobile International will be trialing Ubiquisys femtocells with NEC.

4. Softbank in Japan has announced trials with nearly every supplier on the market, including Ubiquisys, NEC and Motorola.

5. The only other announced trial I’m aware of is Vodafone Group’s announcement to trial Alcatel/Lucent and Huawei, clearly not a UMA-based trial.

Unless I’m mistaken (which I’m sure you’ll to tell me if I am):

Four out of five femtocell trials include a UMA-based system.

This reminds me of the old Trident gum ad where “four out of five dentists agree…”

I attribute this to a couple of reasons:

- It works. Novel but true. UMA has been commercially deployed for more than two years.

- Operators actually want a standard interface. As much as Alcatel/Lucent, Huawei, and even Nokia/Siemens are trying to push their own proprietary approaches, the operators have had enough. They want an open, public standard interface for femtocells.

- UMA does more than one thing. After deploying a femtocell service, a mobile operator may want to add a fixed line VoIP service (like T-Mobile US). The same UMA infrastructure supports that, or dual-mode phones, or softmobiles.

Next, let's see if we can get to 9 out of ten...

[UPDATE MARCH 20] Good posted on ThinkFemto about a similar topic. I have a bit more detail. For some reason, ThinkFemto decided to throw in a bunch of picocell wins that ip.Access got, but they aren't femtocells.

Femto's frenzy

In the drive up to Mobile World Congress, there has been ‘femto frenzy’ of press releases. A large chunk of the news has been from UMA-based femtocell players.

Sensing an opportunity to play a significant roll in the market, UMA-based femtocell manufacturers have been aggressive about making the case for UMA as the ‘most viable’ path to standardization of a RAN Gateway/ ‘Iu-over-IP’ architecture.

There are rumors that there may be some operator announcements at MWC regarding UMA-based femtocell trial activities. We’ll be sure to update the site as the news comes in.

1. NEC and Kineto propose approach for rapid femtocell standardization
2. Motorola announces a family of femtocell solutions
3. NEC and NETGEAR team to develop an integrated 3G access point for femtocell solution
4. Kineto ready to support commercial femtocell rollouts
5. NETGEAR and Kineto to showcase 3G femto home access solution at MWC
6. NEC announces trial of femtocell solution with mobile operators
7. Kineto and Ubiquisys announce successful interoperability testing between Zonegate and UNC
8. Femto Forum steps up drive for harmonized network integration

As one insider told me that only "...relentless evidence of practical deployments and practical challenges overcome" will convince the market that UMA is the most viable technology for a femtocell /network integration standard. This looks like the start of some relentless-ness.

Femtocells get 'boring'

Yesterday, Michelle Donegan with Unstrung posted a story about her experiences with installing and setting up a femtocell. In a word, the story was ‘boring’.

I say it was boring because there was no drama, no complex settings, no difficult radio resource planning, no back end configurations.

Michelle was with the folks from Ubiquisys. And as advertised, she simply plugged in the femtocell and started to use it. She had a relatively boring ‘plug and play’ femtocell experience.

In this ever complex world, a 'boring' femtocell solution is exactly what we need.

Unfortunate UMA’s role in making the femtocell plug and play was left out.

Ubiquisys uses UMA as the femtocell to core network protocol. One of the reasons why it was ‘plug and play’ is that UMA already contains a robust femtocell ‘discovery’ procedure. The femtocell can automatically determine the appropriate UMA Network Controller based on location.

Also, UMA already contains detailed ‘access control’ policy management, so the operator can determine if the femtocell should be enabled for service, and then if a specific handset can use that specific femtocell to receive services.

This is not to take anything away from Ubiquisys. Certainly the RF planning is a very difficult and complex task which they have clearly been able to handle better than most. As Will Franks from Ubiquisys says in the article, “It costs a lot of money to build a box with no buttons.”

But Ubiquisys’s decision to leverage UMA is also part of their plan for simplicity. With UMA, so many of the basic protocol elements such as discovery, access control, security and scalability which are so critical for making a ‘technology’ into a deployable ‘service’ have already been addressed.

Ubiquisys is ready to start selling millions of femtocells way before any of their competitors. This is in a small part to the fact that their back end solution, UMA, already works as advertised.

UMA-enabled Femtocells?

A common question I get is “when femtocells arrive, won’t they displace UMA?” First off, what is generally meant by this is not ‘...displace UMA’ but more accurately ‘...displace dual-mode handset services.’ UMA, as we all know, is a generic IP access technology that can be used to implement a dual-mode handset (DMH) service with cellular/Wi-Fi phones but it’s not actually tied specifically to Wi-Fi.

However, as a generic IP access technology for mobile services, UMA actually plays a key role in a mass-market femtocell solution.

As the operators begin to plan for a robust deployment with hundreds of thousands of femtocell access points into the network, some stringent requirements have emerged:

- An industry recognized, well defined standard such than any femto AP can be interoperable with any core network controller

- “Internet grade” security to run over the public broadband network

- A high-capacity, scalable controller to support thousands of concurrent connections

- The ability to support “consumer” behaviors of unplugging access points, moving access points, plugging in access points where they don’t belong (different countries)

- A protocol which supports a retail femtocell distribution model such that each AP is “standard” out of the box and can self-configure/attach to the network

- And it goes without saying: cost-effective core network controller solution that will not throw the business case out of whack.

Initially, many suppliers jumped to the conclusion that the existing protocol (known as “Iu-B”) which runs between the radios (or “node-b”) and the controller (or RNC) in a macro UMTS network would be sufficient.

But after digging in a bit, it’s pretty well understood that Iu-b was designed to meet a different set of deployment requirements. Iu-b was architected to support a handful of extremely high capacity radio connected over private, secure, managed links.

This is nearly the exact opposite of a femtocell deployment, with many thousands of low capacity (in terms of concurrent calls) radios, all connected over un-managed and un-secured IP networks.

UMA however, was designed for just such a deployment scenario. UMA offers a well defined, robust protocol with a secure connection to the mobile core. In a DMH deployment, UMA supports hundreds of thousands of devices with relatively low concurrent capacity, quite similar to the femtocell usage model. As a well defined standard, femtocell technology suppliers such as UbiquiSys and others can develop UMA-enabled products which interoperate with UMA controllers from Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Alcatel.

As operators begin to leverage the public internet and broadband IP to deliver mobile services, UMA will be used for more applications beyond DHM and femtocells. UMA is truly becoming the ‘Universal’ Mobile Access protocol.

Informa's very successful 2nd UMA conference

Last week Informa held its second UMA conference in Cannes. Overall it was a very successful event, with 8 presentations from operators (two from Orange). All the key players were there in force, including Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Kineto.

In addition, there were many operators who had come to hear about the market and the successes to date. They weren’t disappointed, Orange, Telia and Telecom Italia all presented on the status of their deployments and feedback on the successes.

While it would not be appropriate for me to recite information verbatim, we did get excellent insight into metric of UMA users. Also, Telia shared a very clever television commercial they are running in Denmark for their HomeFree service. It highlighted their fixed/mobile offer and the key benefits. No wonder there is so much demand.

One very interesting presentation was from NXP on their efforts to increase battery performance for UMA devices. The net result is that NXP now has an extremely competitive platform which, in their words, offers up to 9 hrs talk time and 200 hrs standby-time for UMA-enabled handsets. I believe that meets the GSM bar. Kudos to NXP.

Will Franks with UbiquiSys offered an insightful presentation on femtocell technology and how dual-mode handsets and femtos will likely co-exist in the market.

There were two key themes at the event:

First, the industry absolutely needs more handsets. I believe in the coming months, two things will happen. First, there are a LOT of devices in the pipeline, and they will come to market. This is immediately very good news. Second, I believe the operators are beginning to realize the need to actively pursue the handset eco-system for more models. This means being more public about their services and the successes to date.

Second, several operators presented why they chose to go with UMA and not an alternative solution like VCC/IMS. I think hearing the feedback directly from operators on the evaluation process they went through and why they are skeptical or down-right dismissive of VCC was extremely validating for me. As you recall, this is the year I believe the industry will begin to realize just how limiting VCC truly is (witness DT dropping their pre-VCC “T-One service).

All in all, it was excellent. For those of you who didn’t make it, don’t hesitate to send me a note if you’d like to get more information. Next year’s event promises to be even better.

3GSM and Femtocells

Recovery from 3GSM is well underway, but as I reflect on it, a hot topic of the show was femtocells. Nearly every operator wanted to hear the femtocell story and how UMA is the technology for integrating hundreds of thousands of devices into the mobile core.

The “lack of handsets” is considered to be the biggest downside to dual mode handset service and seems to be driving everyone to femtocells. Even with announcements for new devices from Sagem, HP and BenQ, the market wanted to hear how femtocells will deliver fixed-mobile substitution.

From a UMA perspective, dual mode handsets or femtocells are fine. Both drive the investment in the mobile network equipment. And once installed, operators can leverage the UNC for either dual mode handset service and/or femtocells.

All in all, femtocells are a win-win for UMA technology.