3GPP working on femtocell standard

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile phone standardisation committee has started work on a femtocell standard, which should be ready by the end of 2008. The forthcoming standard for small-scale mobile phone transmitters and receivers will also describe the interface between the femtocell (Home Node B, HNB) and the Home Node B gateway (HNB GW). The interface is known as Iu-h and is a mixture of the existing Iu and Generic Access Network (GAN) standards proposed by Alcatel-Lucent, Kineto, Motorola and NEC.

At the start of the process, all the companies involved submitted a number of proposals to 3GPP. Realising that this might cause a logjam in the negotiations, Alcatel-Lucent, Kineto, Motorola and NEC then submitted a joint proposal, which was accepted at a meeting of the 3GPP RAN working group.

As a result of this decision, all manufacturers will have to adapt their femtocells and gateways. Alcatel-Lucent, Kineto, Motorola, NEC and others such as Ubiquisys certainly face an easier task, as they already use the GAN solution. Ubiquisys claims already to be able to produce femtocells conforming to the standard.

(trk)