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Picochip successfully participates in second femtocell plugfest

2nd February 2011

ES Admin

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Picochip announces that it has participated in the second plugfest, which focused on femtocell management. The event was run by the Femto Forum, the independent industry and operator association that supports femtocell deployment worldwide. The series of plugfests aim to cultivate an effective ecosystem of standardised femtocells which provide operators and consumers with a wider choice of femtocell products, while also facilitating economies of scale which will help bring down the cost of equipment. The plugfest had widespread vendor support with over 13 companies participating, including vendors of network equipment and femtocell access points as well as component providers.

The plugfest focused on the effectiveness of the Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors. The Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard (TR-196) was published in April 2009 and is an extension of the TR-069 standard that is widely used in fixed broadband networks and set-top boxes. The femtocell standard allows mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning and configuration, radio environment monitoring, diagnostics-checking and software updates.

This second plugfest is another significant step on the road to broad market acceptance and increasing volume deployments of femtocells, commented David Maidment, VP Product Management at Picochip. As the only IC supplier to have participated, Picochip are proud to, once again, be at the forefront of the technical and commercial development of femtocell technology. We were also extremely pleased to see our customers participating using both our reference design and our PHY, proving the quality and robustness of our technology.

“With the femtocell market undergoing tremendous growth, and even overtaking the total number of macrocells in several markets, the importance of management has never been greater. Operators need a simple and reliable means of managing potentially millions of access points. This plugfest was crucial in order to ensure the industry’s agreed standard approach is effective in practice so operators can confidently deploy compatible equipment from the increasing range on offer,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum.

The plugfest was organized in cooperation with ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) as an ETSI Plugtests(TM) interoperability testing event and overseen by testing and compliance consultancy TRaC Global. The companies participating were Ablaze Wireless, Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent Telecom, Alpha Networks, Argela, Askey Computer Corporation, Huawei, Institute for Information Industry, NEC Corporation, Node-H, Nokia Siemens Networks, Picochip and Ubiquisys.