Some brief notes on other announcements from last week…
Femtocell Industry Awards 2009
The winners of the Femto Forum’s inaugural Femtocell Industry Awards were announced at a dazzling gala dinner. ip.access picked up awards for the nano3G picocell / enterprise femtocell (in the design and technology innovation category) and for our Facebook virtual fridge notes demo (in the femtocell service category). Other award winners included NEC, Sprint, Cellcom, picoChip, SoftBank, and individual awards for Taka Yoshizawa and Chris Fenton.
ABI forecasts 366,000 picocells by 2013
ABI Research estimates that in 2013, there will have been cumulative deployments of about 366,000 picocells worldwide, representing 38% CAGR from 2008. ABI recently published separate reports on picocells and “super-femtocells”, with a higher forecast for the latter. However, in practice it’s not clear whether there is any distinction between picocells and super-femtocells.
Percello shows PRC6000
At the Femtocells World Summit, Percello demonstrated live calls on their PRC6000 chip using a Ubiquisys AP. Yoav Volloch (one of the industry’s great enthusiasts) took me up to the Percello demo suite, where the 16-user PRC6500 was also on display. Yoav showed me 8 simultaneous calls and HSDPA at 9.4 Mbps, with software for the demos provided by Node H.
Texas Instruments announced femto silicon
Texas Instruments has unveiled two new femtocell chipsets based on scaled down macro basestation DSPs. The new residential femto DSP is a dual-core processor that can support eight simultaneous users, while the enterprise femto architecture is a triple-core DSP supporting up to 32 simultaneous calls. Caroline Gabriel gives a great analysis here.
Ubiquisys has announced their G3 enterprise femtocell (i.e. picocell), based on Percello’s Aquilo PRC6000 chip. The G3 will support up to eight simultaneous users and HSPA+ data at 21.6 /5.7 Mbps. There will also be a future version supporting up to 16 users (based on the PRC6500 chip). Shipments of the G3 femtocell will start from Q4 2009.
In other news…
- Huawei shows off “funky femtos”.
- IntelliNet announces Iu-h compliant femto gateway.
- Airvana announces partnership with VeriSign for femto security…
- …and comments on NSN’s acquisition of Nortel assets.
- Femtocells – the need for speed, and life in the fast lane.
- Another Finnish operator to launch UMTS 900 – TeliaSonera follows Elisa’s lead.
- Mobile data not yet essential for Americans.
- Think Femtocell report on Day 1, Day 2 & Day 3 of the Femtocells World Summit.
Filed under: Market updates | Tagged: ABI, Airvana, Femtocell, Femtocell Industry Awards, femtocells, Huawei, IntelliNet, ip.access, Percello, TeliaSonera, Texas Instruments, Ubiquisys
