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Report from CTIA

Femto Hub Blog (Apr 8 2009) Americas , Femto Events , Femtocell Specialists , Network Equipment Vendors

Categories:
Hot Topics: 4G, Applications, Network, Standards
Regions: Americas, Asia-Pacific, EMEA
More: Femto Events, Market Research
Value Chain: Enabling Technologies, Femtocell Specialists, Network Equipment Vendors, Operators
Other: Jobs, Misc
  1. Report from CTIA By Josh Adelson and David Nowicki

    CTIA took place in Las Vegas last week.  For those not familiar with CTIA, it is North America’s largest wireless event and the second largest in the world only slightly behind Mobile World Congress.  Unlike MWC, CTIA attracts a considerable contingent of CDMA vendors and operators from around the world especially across the Americas.  CDMA represents perhaps only 20% of the the world’s mobile subscribers, but at the moment it’s probably greater than 80% of commercial femtocells.  And if you look out over the next couple years, one could argue that CDMA will continue to command the largest portion of femtocell deployments. This fact was not lost upon Qualcomm when they decided recently to enter both the CDMA and UMTS femtocell chipset markets.

    Sprint was the first operator to deploy femtocells commercially, followed by a similarly voice-coverage-related offer from Verizon.  Historically, CDMA operators have behaved as mavericks, early to innovate and launch new services and technologies thereby gaining competitive advantage, and not content to wait for standards to be fully ratified. This is certainly playing out again in the femtocell case.

    Femtocells were in strong evidence at CTIA, with CDMA vendors taking advantage of the event to show off their wares:

    • Airvana demonstrated its HubBub CDMA doing voice and mobile broadband data calling, as well as applications like automatic home playback of mobile pictures, and presence-generated text message notifications.
    • AirWalk showed their newly-announced EdgePoint Pro, an enterprise femtocell product line with a 1xRTT model that is said to support up to 100 voice users and a separate EV-DO model for up to 32 data users. AirWalk and Starent also announced a that Cellcom intends to deploy a femtocell solution comprised of the two companies’ respective products. Cellcom is a U.S. regional carrier in northeastern Wisconsin estimated to have several hundred thousand subscribers.
    • Hitachi showed femtocells and femtocell network solutions, based on their partnership with Airvana.
    • Motorola showed their femtocell picture frame, which won the CTIA Emerging Technology Best in Show Award. This picture frame uses the Airvana CDMA femto module.
    • Beyond femtocell devices, a number of networking product vendors were showing their products as in-network elements of a femtocell solution: Airvana used its Universal Access Gateway (UAG) as the CDMA femto network gateway in its live demonstrations. Tatara showed its Convergence Server interoperating in a live demo with Airvana and AirWalk femtocells. Both Acme Packet and Starent Networks were promoting their respective network products in femtocell gateway-oriented configurations.
    It wasn’t only about CDMA of course.  Ubiquisys and Alcatel-Lucent were both demonstrating their UMTS femtocells in virtual home number applications, and Airvana was showing its HubBub UMTS doing high-speed video streaming to laptops and iPhones as well as various femtozone applications.

    Femto Forum Chairman Simon Saunders led femtocell panel session.  Among other things, Saunders ticked off the considerable accomplishments of the organization over the past year, including gaining agreement and action on femtocell standards through 3GPP, developing a rigorous business case, and growing the Forum's membership from 7 to 105 companies.

    With CTIA 2009 now complete, the next big wireless industry event will be the ITU Telecom show in Geneva. This was once clearly the Olympics of Telecom, occurring once every four years and attracting 200,000 people. The last ITU show in Hong Kong did not measure up to the heyday of Geneva Telecom 1999, so we will need to wait and see what Geneva 2009 will bring this October. Then the focus will turn to Mobile World Congress in February 2010, though by that time femtocells may also be more prominent at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and CeBIT.

    Time to start working on those 2010 demos!

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