15 Feb 2012

Femto Forum Changes to Small Cell Forum

The Femto-Forum has announced that it has changed its name to the Small Cell Forum to reflect the forum’s work and support for all forms of small cell technology for enterprise, metro and rural small cells. This change has taken place as a result of the much wider use of small cell technology, including that originally aimed at residential and office femtocells.

One of the keys to the deployment of LTE is the deployment of small cells and as such, all forms of small cell technology have grown in their scope and importance. Originally much of the work of the Femto Forum was focussed upon femtocells in the home or office, but the growing importance, the technology has become more widespread, extending well beyond the office and home.

Another reason for the name change has been to prevent the perception that the small cell arena is fragmented. With many of the traditional infrastructure providers entering the market to offer small cells integrated into the operator’s backhaul, there could be a perception of two different camps. However much of the basic small cell technology is based upon that used by femto cells, and therefore there is considerable leverage to be gained from having a single umbrella organisation to cover the whole field. Accordingly, the Small Cell Forum will serve to develop consensus on common approaches, standards and agreed best practice for all small cells.

The Forum will address all small cells that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence – including what have been dubbed femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells. It will also support the crossover between small cells and other relevant technologies including: Wi-Fi, cloud RAN (which connects cellular radio to cloud-based intelligence over fibre), Distributed Antenna Systems, as well as macrocells as part of the new heterogeneous network (hetnet) environment.

The role of the Small Cell Forum will be to tackle the practical challenges facing deployment. This includes finding appropriate small cell sites; delivering power and backhaul; managing interactions between small cells, macrocells and other wireless technologies; and effective interoperability and network management. This continues the work of the Femto Forum which has been actively working on small cells outside the home for some time, as well as their interactions with other technologies. Examples of this work include integrated Femto/Wi-Fi devices and networks; enterprise multi-femto architectures; public access small cell interference management; standards and management processes which are generic across all small cell types; and LTE small cell standards for all environments.

“Femtocell technology was originally designed for the home but has since extended into enterprise picocells, urban metrocells and modern microcells for all manner of locations. The core technologies developed by members of the Femto Forum - including Systems on a Chip, provisioning systems, standardised gateways, and other related innovations - lower the cost of licensed band solutions and facilitate easy deployments for all small cell products. As such it is the ‘small cell’ banner that now best represents these technologies and it is one that mobile operators are strongly endorsing. In fact, surveys show operators regard small cells as playing a more important role than macrocells in future mobile networks*,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Small Cell Forum.

Figures show how small cell technology has been growing in its deployment. According to ABI Research, 4.3 million small cells (including femtocells, picocells and microcells) will be shipped in 2012. This figure will rise to 36.8 million for 2016. The value of this is estimated at around $20.4 billion.

Small cells have two main areas of deployment, namely indoors and outdoors. ABI Research’s data suggested that by 2016 indoor small cells would constitute 94% of total shipments, while outdoor small cells will make up 64% of the revenue.

The success of the small cell market to date has focused on femtocells which have been deployed by 37 operators worldwide, including eight of the top ten (by revenue), with a 112% increase in deployments in 2011. These deployments have started to achieve scale with Sprint surpassing 500K units and Vodafone UK, Japan’s Softbank and France’s SFR, exceeding 100K – not to mention AT&T which is the world’s largest deployment.

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