June 3, 2009

WiMAX and Femto Forums to collaborate to advance WiMAX Femtocells

The Femto Forum and the WiMAX Forum agreed to collaborate on the development of WiMAX Femtocell Access Point (WFAP) specifications that will address topics such as end-to-end QoS, provisioning, network entry and authentication, power optimization, and mobility management. The specifications will also support for emergency services, lawful intercept, and location-based services.

Considering the growing demand for broadband wireless access inside homes and offices while enabling mobility and roaming across wide area networks, WiMAX operators and vendors have identified the need for femtocell solutions to increase the aggregate cell throughput per unit area and accordingly to improve the related quality of intra-cell links, particularly in indoor environments.

“Femtocells will provide a powerful new tool for WiMAX operators. By significantly increasing the number of cells in a wireless network using femtocells, operators can deliver a dramatically better service than using macro networks alone,” said Simon Saunders, Chairman of the Femto Forum. “This partnership will not only enable vendor interoperability and increased economies of scale thereby driving competition- it will also help to support far-reaching new femtocell applications.”

“The operators in our community are looking toward femtocells to improve coverage and capacity while retaining the benefits of end-to-end Quality of Service management that is one of the great benefits of the WiMAX network,“ said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum. “WiMAX specifications will support WiMAX certification of interoperable vendor products. We look forward to interactions with the Femto Forum to ensure that our specifications take advantage of its expertise regarding industry best practices for femtocell deployments.”

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