Over 240 Leading Industry Professionals meet in London to discuss way forward for Femtocells.

The Avren Events conference exceeded all expectations with over 240 delegates from leading telecoms companies around the globe meeting to discuss the technologies, business models and timeframes for the introduction of femtocells – router sized home basestations for cellular phones.

Leading carriers and key players were quick to declare the outstanding benefit and quality of the event, most of whom are already committed to the follow up Dallas Femtocell Conference in December.

Deployment of femtocells is planned on all the major continents within the next 12 – 18 months with SPRINT focussing on WiMAX home basestations for the North American Market, Softbank soon to deploy 3G femtocells for the Japanese market and Vodafone, Telefonica-02, T-Mobile, Orange, etc to deploy 2G and 3G home basestations for the European and Global markets.

Mr Junichi Miyakawa, CTO of Softbank, presented ambitious plans to have commercial femto deployments in Spring 08, and Sunil Prasad, Director of Sprint, predicted similar timeframes for roll-out in major US cities. Bruno Dachary of Orange-FT, Chris Fenton of Telefonica-02, Alan Law of Vodafone and Jiri Valek of T-Mobile all announced on-going field trials for femtocells with limited commercial deployments in late 07 or early 08.

With Nokia Siemens Networks, NEC, ZTE, Samsung, Ericsson, Huawei, Ubiquisys, ip access, Radioframe, Motorola, Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent all working on the home access point technology there is no shortage of femtocell providers coming to the fore. Several presenters at the conference highlighted different solutions for network access, security, interference management, etc, supporting the need and challenge for the recently formed Femto Forum (www.femtoforum.org) – an organisation set up to promote standards in the femtocell market place.

During the next 6 months, significant progress will be made on large scale field trials, technology integration, business model development, package pricing models, innovative home services and consumer positioning – all of which will form the backdrop for the second International Conference on Femtocells and Home Access Points to be held in Dallas on Dec 5-7 2007, (http://www.avrenevents.com/dallasfemto2007)

Top level speakers from Sprint. Vodafone, Softbank, T-Mobile, Telefonica-02, and other leading carriers, OEMS, analysts and vendors will be taking part. In addition the Femto Forum will be holding their plenary meeting and updating the conference on the latest progress in the Femtocell standards process.