Charlie Vogt: We expect to see market acceleration soon

With femtocells already in deployment at Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Vodafone, AT&T, SFR and numerous other operators, the technology is moving into the mainstream. Juniper Research has predicted that femtocell subscribers will exceed 15 million in 2012, with revenues from advanced femtocell services reaching approximately $9bn in 2014. In Europe alone, analyst firm Frost & Sullivan projects a femtocell subscription base of 11.8m, also by 2014. Against that backdrop and given the need for enhanced 3G indoor coverage and data offload -- especially with the rise of LTE networks in the difficult to manage 2.6GHz spectrum in Europe, femtocell deployment looks set to ramp up sharply.

From their roots as a means to improve home coverage and reduce operator costs, femtocells are now being deployed in the enterprise environment. Significantly, deployments are confined to the SME or SOHO sector, while large enterprises are finding the technology increasingly applicable as they seek to serve small and mid-sized locations and look to equip home workers with unified communications and PBX-style functionality.

It is now recognised that femtocells provide a cost-effective means to bring PBX capability to mobile devices and employees working at home. In addition, they have clear benefits in improving indoor cellphone coverage – especially when it comes to 3G, and they provide the ability to support additional capacity for mobilised business applications.

Genband is one company that is heavily engaged in the technology’s roll-out. The company claims its solutions are used in several current commercial deployments and two-thirds of all femtocell field trials. Perhaps most significantly, it is involved in one of the first publicly announced femtocell deployments in Europe. The company has supplied its Genband G9 Converged Gateway to NEC, which recently won the contract to supply French operator SFR. NEC is one of the first providers to bring an end-to-end femtocell solution to market that includes the compact, indoor femtocell access point for installation into customer premises along with the supporting femtocell gateway from Genband. The gateway is a fundamental component of NEC’s femtocell proposition, aggregating and connecting potentially millions of access points to the operator’s core network.

“After the initial hype stage, we are seeing significant momentum in the market with more than 50 operators involved in at least some level of trial activity,” says Charlie Vogt, chief executive of Genband. “Standards are in place, thanks to a significant push by 3GPP, the Femto Forum and several valuable eco-systems that are forming.”

Not least, Genband’s own newly announced Femtocell Partner Ecosystem which is designed to support system integrator implementations of open, standards-based and flexible femtocell solutions for service providers. The Partner Ecosystem ensures Genband’s G9 Converged Gateway and S2 Security Gateway products are fully interoperable with the leading femtocell controller and access point providers. Multiple deployments have now resulted from the significant investments in lab and field trials. These trials have resulted in the interoperability certification of Genband’s Femtocell Gateway with femtocell access points, controllers and service provider networks. The Genband ecosystem supports all major standards including pre-Iuh and 3GPP Iuh, SIP and 1X/EVDO, as well as in fixed, mobile and converged environments for both consumer and enterprise applications. As part of the initiative, Genband, both independently and through system integrators such as NEC, has certified interoperability for specific femtocell applications and standards with all of the top femtocell controllers and access point providers, such as Airvana, Airwalk, Kineto Wireless, Tatara Systems and Ubiquisys.

For Vogt, the operator challenge now lies in getting the commercial offering right. “The main issues today are around the business case associated with macrocell coverage and capacity, as well as the pricepoint of femtocells,” he says. “However, with next generation chipsets and femtocells on the market, we expect pricing issues to be addressed in the near term.”

That pricing issue and the need for clearer commercial models to emerge have caused a small delay to the high volume market. “With larger operators now either in trial or initial deployments, we expect to soon see some market acceleration,” adds Vogt.

That delay is no bad thing for Vogt. Femtocell products aren’t the only offering in Genband’s portfolio. The company was established in 1999 and, in the intervening decade, has become a $150m turnover company with more than 800 customers ­– nearly half of which make a purchase each year. According to industry analysts, Genband is the leading supplier of telecom gateway products, and the company has grown rapidly through strategic partnering and smart acquisition.

“Telecom consolidation is occurring among the smaller, best-of-breed companies, and we have been successful at riding that wave,” says Vogt. “As a result, we partner with many of the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturers, who look to Genband for important parts of their end-to-end solutions.”

The company’s products are truly leading-edge, enabling wireline and wireless operators to seamlessly, securely and cost-effectively transition their networks to the all IP future. Their flagship G9 platform is the industry’s only true next-generation media gateway platform and has been field-hardened globally across nearly 70 million deployed ports. Genband also boasts the industry’s most scalable SBC as well as its market-leading femtocell security gateway, capable of supporting 1.2m IPSec tunnels in a single ATCA chassis.

“Unlike some other companies involved in femtocells, this market forms only a very small portion of our revenue stream today,” adds Vogt. “However, we continue to innovate and advance our products, putting us in a position to capitalise on the multi-million user deployments that are envisaged.”

Vogt sees the company’s security gateway expertise being critical to the developing femtocell sector. “Initially, most large network equipment provider sought to build their own end-to-end femtocell proposition,” he adds. “Now we are seeing many of these large vendors coming to us for the security gateway component. Our products are proven, widely-deployed and well-respected in the industry. By selecting our security gateway, equipment vendors are able to accelerate their time-to-market by concentrating on their core competencies.”

That strategy has come to fruition and Genband counts several major equipment vendors among its customers. In Europe, NEC is a major femtocell partner and several operator launch announcements are imminent. In the Asia Pacific and Chinese markets, Genband works with ZTE and others, and is engaged in the largest North American CDMA femtocell deployments.

The 3G market for femtocells is very much here and now and volumes are ramping up as enterprise users embrace the associated benefits. As to the prospects for femtocells and voice over LTE, Vogt feels Genband is well positioned whatever the direction operators take. “We recognise there are multiple solutions being proposed and we can support all of these with our products today,” he says. “Since we are already providing part of a UMA/GAN solution for Wi-Fi dual mode phones, we can easily adapt this to support the very similar VoLGA (Voice over LTE via Generic Access) architecture. Our products also support both OneVoice, the recently announced simplified IMS for LTE proposal by several operators, as well as full IMS and other models using convergence servers.” GTB