A WiMAX femtocell is likely further away. The WiMAX Forum has created a working group to look at certification profile femtocell, but the forum has yet to certify a Mobile WiMAX macro base station or customer premise equipment unit. The first certified WiMAX products may just barely make Sprint’s commercial launch of Xohm early in the second quarter. Just as Sprint has driven WiMAX interoperability testing and influenced the WiMAX certification process, however, it may push the development of WiMAX femtocells. Sprint has indicated it wants to go small with its WiMAX network, focusing on smaller access points rather than huge macro base stations and eventually moving to picocells and femtocells to fill in its footprint.

Infonetics Research projects femtocells will grow into a $630 million global business in 2010, dominated by UMTS boxes, with sales ramping up in 2008. If Infonetics projections are correct, it means carriers are going to start buying femtocells before fully standardized equipment is available, which may not be as surprising as it sounds, said Todd Mersch, product marketing manager at Continuous Computing, a company that develops and licenses femtocell signaling and media access architecture.

“Verizon made it very clear they’re more worried about the solution fitting into their network evolution than the standard,” Mersch said. “They would like to see their femtocells eventually form part of a standard someday. They’re willing to go forward with trials and take the standardized products when they are ready for their commercial launches.”

Trials and pilots like Sprint’s using proprietary equipment are likely to comprise the majority of femtocell activity in 2008 for that reason. But just because these boxes are not certified under a standard doesn’t mean they aren’t using standard protocols, Mersch said. The key difference between standardized gear is that pre-standard equipment will have to be deployed as an end-to-end solution, likely with a big vendor like Nokia Siemens Networks or Sagem acting as systems integrator, Mersch said.

NSN has already begun anticipating that market. Though it has bowed out of the femtocell market itself, it is developing femtocell gateways and teaming with other companies to supply the home base stations themselves. It has already signed deals with Airvana and Thomson, and earlier this week, RadioFrame became its third partner. Though these system integrators will be able to provide customers with a full solution, carriers will only commit to a platform with standardization in its future, Mersch said. Only with standards in place can the industry achieve the volumes of femtocells necessary to drive down unit costs so they’re affordable to the average customer.

“It comes down to economies of scale,” Mersch said. “Operators will be tentative about deploying millions of femtocells if they aren’t standardized.”