Femtocells Important To LTE Rollouts
London’s The Femto Forum just published what it describes as an “operator-friendly” guide to Long Term Evolution (LTE) femtocell architecture options now contained in the 3GPP standard.
According to the report, the three femtocell architecture options outlined in the LTE standard support a wide variety of operator deployment scenarios. It details what operators need to consider to make the most prudent architecture choice, based on their specific business and technology circumstances. It also finds that operator choice should be dictated by how quickly they wish to bring a femtocell service to market, their current network architecture and how widely they intend to deploy femtocells in the longer term.?
Says Professor Simon Saunders, chairman of The Femto Forum, “Femtocells bring powerful benefits to LTE by ensuring that users receive the best possible experience and operators maximize their investment in the new networks. The operator and vendor community in the Femto Forum have examined the LTE standard in detail and this guide for operators firmly establishes the virtues of the different architecture options.” ??
Adds Peter Jarich, mobile ecosystem service director at Current Analysis, “LTE femtocell endorsements and trials from operators including China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and Telefonica point to growing interest. Of course, just as LTE requires new network architectures in the macro-cell RAN, operators looking at LTE femtocells need to carefully plan out their small-cell architecture.”??
To download the new LTE Femtocell Architecture Guide, click here?
