The market for femtocells — essentially very small IP base stations that could be deployed in customer homes to support fixed/mobile convergence and other applications — may need some time to mature, but interest in developing femtocell products is surging.

Several companies announced femtocell products and partnerships at the 3GSM World Congress last week in Barcelona. Samsung and ZTE said they were partnering to develop home base stations, while Tatara Systems and 3Way Networks announced a collaboration involving 3Way's Home Base Station access point product and Tatara's Mobile Service Convergence server and other products.

RadioFrame Networks demonstrated its new mircochip architecture, which can be applied to picocells or femtocells. That microchip architecture will be available in the third quarter this year, and NEC announced it is partnering with both Tatara and Ubiquisys to incorporate the femtocell solutions of those companies into NEC's home gateway architecture.

Meanwhile, picoChip, the primary semiconductor company championing small base stations for factors like picocells and femtocells, announced a high-speed uplink packet access (HSUPA)-based femtocell reference architecture. HSUPA provides better uplink performance in 3G mobile networks, as well as lower latency to support applications such as voice.

The marketing activity comes just a couple weeks after Japan's Softbank Mobile committed to deploy Alcatel-Lucent's picocell platform. In the hierarchy of base station form factors, picocells are smaller than microcells, but larger than femtocells, and are intended primarily to tackle corporate in-building applications. Though Softbank publicly committed only to deploy picocells, many observers believe it could be a first step to deploying femtocell home base stations.

Many companies believe picocells may need to succeed in the market before femtocells get their own shot. Mickey Miller, group president of wireless network solutions for Andrew Corp., which is an OEM supplier to many picocell vendors, said, “Picos will take off before femtos, and they really have to in order to validate the market and price points for smaller base stations. Developing an IP interface for a small base station isn't simple and creates an expense, and it's unclear yet that a femtocell can hit the right price points.”

FEMTOCELLS BY THE NUMBERS

32 million

Number of femtocell shipments expected by 2011

102 million

Number of users on those femtocells by 2011

Source: ABI Research