Picochip leads the femtocell industry at MWC

17th February 2011

ES Admin

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At Mobile World Congress 2011 Picochip demonstrated its small-cell industry leadership by showing 25 customer products based on picoXcell and picoArray technology. These included a number of products for residential and enterprise use, Airspan’s new Airsynergy LTE picocell, and metropolitan femtocells from Alcatel Lucent and BelAir Systems. There were also operator branded products, including a DataCell used by Korea’s SK Telecom for capacity offload.

“MWC this year has been great for us and we’ve seen really strong customer interest, from both established femtocell players and new entrants to the market,” said Nigel Toon, CEO of Picochip. “Last year our focus was on proving the residential proposition and introducing people to the potential of the femtocell. In 2011 we are demonstrating that the femtocell has come of age and illustrating just how much it can do – from providing coverage in metropolitan and rural areas, to innovative presence detection and LTE.”

On Picochip’s stand was the PC3008, Picochip’s advanced HSPA+ solution that enables basestations in ultra-small form factors such as USB sticks. In addition, the company showcased the PC500 single-device LTE baseband solution.

“It’s been great to be able to show such a wide variety of our customers’ final products,” said Andy Gothard, Director of Corporate Marketing at Picochip. “The range of devices on show, from residential to enterprise and metropolitan femtocells, from some of the biggest names in the industry, shows just how strong Picochip is in this market.

“One of the big themes this year has been LTE and as a result we’ve seen an exceptional level of interest in our LTE small cell demonstration. At the other end of the scale many visitors were interested in the USB femtocell concept that puts a 3G basestation in your pocket– illustrating just how diverse this market now is.”

Live demonstrations on the Picochip stand included simultaneous up and down streaming of HD video via LTE. This was the first public demonstration of end-to-end interoperability between an LTE femtocell and commercial user equipment (UEs), in partnership with Cavium (formerly Wavesat) and Continuous Computing. Picochip also featured a presence-detection application developed by Argela, showing home automation and integration with IPTV streaming.

Enterprise and metropolitan femtocells have been an industry focus throughout 2010. Examples of enterprise femtocells on show at the Picochip stand included products from ip.access, Spidercloud and Alcatel Lucent. Metropolitan femtocells / picocells were represented by Alcatel-Lucent's 9364 Metro Cell, Contela, BelAir’s strand-based system and the Airspan LTE AirSynergy.