Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Architecture. Show all posts
8 Aug 2007
Femto cell concept propelling "Core" activities
An interesting read on Mobile Europe discussing core network opportunities for Femto cells.
7 Aug 2007
Three areas unexploited enough by Femtocell marketing efforts
The three points talked about in every Femtocell customer meeting:
1 - Price and potential savings
2 - The indoor coverage advantage
3 - Architecture and how to integrate with existing network infrastructure
The Femtocell marketing effort can benefit from addressing three other areas:
1- Targeting new breed of customers: Most of the effort is spent towards soliciting the traditional operators (VF, FT/Orange, T-Mobile ...etc), all of which either already have mature networks or in the process of building them. One of the important selling points of the Femtocell concept is that the network can be operational from the day the first router is shipped. There is no time wasted acquiring sites and building them....etc. Therefore the prospects for new entrants are great and therefore targeting these new market entrants instead of traditional operators is a good strategy. These new entrants will have a discernibly different business model from the traditional mobile operator model.
2- High rise buildings and vertical cities: I don't know why everybody assumes that Femtocells are ideal for the typical US and European suburbia. Most people around the world live in flats in high rise buildings, tower blocks and apartments. I'd like to see the Femtocell concept pitched for this type of deployment. The benefit over typical macro deployment is easily recognisable.
3- Community Networking: I've talked about this in a previous post. This is essentially copying the FON model of community based networking. This also requires the emergence of a new breed of operators who are ready to experiment with new business models instead of the traditional linking of minutes and ARPU.
1 - Price and potential savings
2 - The indoor coverage advantage
3 - Architecture and how to integrate with existing network infrastructure
The Femtocell marketing effort can benefit from addressing three other areas:
1- Targeting new breed of customers: Most of the effort is spent towards soliciting the traditional operators (VF, FT/Orange, T-Mobile ...etc), all of which either already have mature networks or in the process of building them. One of the important selling points of the Femtocell concept is that the network can be operational from the day the first router is shipped. There is no time wasted acquiring sites and building them....etc. Therefore the prospects for new entrants are great and therefore targeting these new market entrants instead of traditional operators is a good strategy. These new entrants will have a discernibly different business model from the traditional mobile operator model.
2- High rise buildings and vertical cities: I don't know why everybody assumes that Femtocells are ideal for the typical US and European suburbia. Most people around the world live in flats in high rise buildings, tower blocks and apartments. I'd like to see the Femtocell concept pitched for this type of deployment. The benefit over typical macro deployment is easily recognisable.
3- Community Networking: I've talked about this in a previous post. This is essentially copying the FON model of community based networking. This also requires the emergence of a new breed of operators who are ready to experiment with new business models instead of the traditional linking of minutes and ARPU.
20 Jun 2007
Femtocell Challenges
In a previous post I talked about the potential benefits of femtocells to the operators as well as consumers. In this post I'd like to investigate the potential hurdles in the road to viable femtocell solutions.
Looking at various analysts remarks I narrowed the list of potential show stoppers to the following items, all of which are not unresolvable, but one has to be aware of:
Cost:
This is the obvious one. There is no doubt that we are well into the cost reduction era. This is by far the number one item on every operator's agenda. The bottom line is that operators want to see a nice dollar savings associated with Femto cells, which increases pressure on femto cell development firms to reduce their price tag. Traditionally, pricing is based on a BOM plus margins. An alternative way for development firms is to price based on potential benefits/savings. My firm has recently been engaged in a similar pricing activity with a potential investor.
The cost challange means that there is a limit to the amount of effort and features developers will bundle in the femto cell box. Deciding what is "sufficient" feature list is a difficult call (check the technology life cycle model proposed by D. Normann in one of my previous posts)
Radio Planning and interference management:
Unlike Wi Fi, the Femto cell is likely to use the licensed spectrum e.g. UMTS band. Although it is my view that the femto network is better have its own carrier, many clients would like the femto cell concept to work on the same carrier frequency used by existing infrastructure be it a macro, micro or pico layer.
Femtocells are expected to coexist with the rest of the network by automatically configuring themselves. Operator or user intervention is undesirable...a femto cell box has to be fully plug and play without the need to setup,configure or optimise it in anyway. Therefore lots of effort is being spent on femto cell radio management features e.g. choosing the right carrier, automatic setting of power levels, protecting other infrastructure from harmful interference, handoff ...etc .
Core Network Integration:
I touched upon this in a previous post (Femtocell Architecture).
In a nutshell, a legacy architecture is too old fashioned, while on the other hand a full flat IP architecture with an IMS core is an expensive undertaking with no sign of becoming available soon.
Interim solutions relying on some kind of concentrator seem to attract some attention. I can't really comment much on this and I'll leave it to the core experts to make their minds.
With converged solutions such as femto cells there is also an increased expectation of a higher level of network intelligence and features at the edges of the network (as opposed to the traditional model of core intelligence).
End user perception:
The consumer will (and has to) ask: "what's in it for me". At the moment most of the promises revolve around cheaper calls as well as using the often over hyped word: "convergence". The fact is that most people do not know what this word means! The operators will find it challenging to convince the consumer that the femtocell is the way to go.
In addition, there is the issue of backward compatibility in terms of usage. Many people have Internet access at home and a big proportion use WiFi routers to have wireless coverage at home. Is the Femtocell going to replace that? if so, then there is a need to have a combined WiFi/Femto router to enable legacy equipment to access the Internet. Alternatively people will end up with a stack of routers, from different suppliers.... hardly a convergent solution!.
Therefore the extent of device convergence will play a significant role in any operator's femtocell strategy.
There are also health concerns about exposure to increased levels of RF waves.
Looking at various analysts remarks I narrowed the list of potential show stoppers to the following items, all of which are not unresolvable, but one has to be aware of:
Cost:
This is the obvious one. There is no doubt that we are well into the cost reduction era. This is by far the number one item on every operator's agenda. The bottom line is that operators want to see a nice dollar savings associated with Femto cells, which increases pressure on femto cell development firms to reduce their price tag. Traditionally, pricing is based on a BOM plus margins. An alternative way for development firms is to price based on potential benefits/savings. My firm has recently been engaged in a similar pricing activity with a potential investor.
The cost challange means that there is a limit to the amount of effort and features developers will bundle in the femto cell box. Deciding what is "sufficient" feature list is a difficult call (check the technology life cycle model proposed by D. Normann in one of my previous posts)
Radio Planning and interference management:
Unlike Wi Fi, the Femto cell is likely to use the licensed spectrum e.g. UMTS band. Although it is my view that the femto network is better have its own carrier, many clients would like the femto cell concept to work on the same carrier frequency used by existing infrastructure be it a macro, micro or pico layer.
Femtocells are expected to coexist with the rest of the network by automatically configuring themselves. Operator or user intervention is undesirable...a femto cell box has to be fully plug and play without the need to setup,configure or optimise it in anyway. Therefore lots of effort is being spent on femto cell radio management features e.g. choosing the right carrier, automatic setting of power levels, protecting other infrastructure from harmful interference, handoff ...etc .
Core Network Integration:
I touched upon this in a previous post (Femtocell Architecture).
In a nutshell, a legacy architecture is too old fashioned, while on the other hand a full flat IP architecture with an IMS core is an expensive undertaking with no sign of becoming available soon.
Interim solutions relying on some kind of concentrator seem to attract some attention. I can't really comment much on this and I'll leave it to the core experts to make their minds.
With converged solutions such as femto cells there is also an increased expectation of a higher level of network intelligence and features at the edges of the network (as opposed to the traditional model of core intelligence).
End user perception:
The consumer will (and has to) ask: "what's in it for me". At the moment most of the promises revolve around cheaper calls as well as using the often over hyped word: "convergence". The fact is that most people do not know what this word means! The operators will find it challenging to convince the consumer that the femtocell is the way to go.
In addition, there is the issue of backward compatibility in terms of usage. Many people have Internet access at home and a big proportion use WiFi routers to have wireless coverage at home. Is the Femtocell going to replace that? if so, then there is a need to have a combined WiFi/Femto router to enable legacy equipment to access the Internet. Alternatively people will end up with a stack of routers, from different suppliers.... hardly a convergent solution!.
Therefore the extent of device convergence will play a significant role in any operator's femtocell strategy.
There are also health concerns about exposure to increased levels of RF waves.
13 Jun 2007
Femto cell Architecture
The business case for indoor femto cells has gained increasing traction in the last few weeks, and lots of news comments about various femto cell development companies. For example, check here, here and here.
Although the femto cell concept is quickly gaining grounds towards complete and operational products, there is still some misunderstanding on how the overall network architecture will look like. I'll try to address this issue in this post.
A femto cell router is a small device, the size of any Wi-Fi router, which is in effect a miniature base station. The radio is a standard based radio such as UMTS/HSPA which the operator will likely require a license to operate on. The router connects to a DSL line. The idea is to enable the subscriber to make and receive mobile calls indoors, with low signal levels which has a number of benefits to the operator:
- Hopefully accelerate fixed line substitution.
- Reduce the cost of building a full macro layer network.
- Lock subscriber in to the operator and reduce the likelihood of churn.
- Provide a viable medium for content distribution (the ugly walled garden paradigm)
It is not my intention here to argue for or against these benefits. I will dedicate a full post on the business case for the femto cell and the potential cons sometime soon. So let us stay on the technology side and try to investigate how a UMTS based femto cell routers will be integrated with the operator's core network.
Basically, there are a number of ways, the first of which is the conventional hierarchy using an RNC . Just like any node-b is connected back to an RNC which is then in turn is connected to the core network, the femtocell routers can be treated like individual node-bs and connect to RNCs. This may appeal to big manufacturers who already have substantial deployments and many RNC on the ground. The downside to this approach is the limited chances of inter-operable devices if the operators chooses to diversify their suppliers. Although the Iub interface (base station to RNC) is standardised, the reality is most implementations are proprietary. Typically operators don't like to put all their eggs in one basket and would prefer to get solutions from various suppliers. The other downside of this approach is that most available RNC solutions are geared towards Macro/Micro type of deployments. In other words they are built in order to support relatively small number of cells with a huge number of subscribers in each cell. They don't scale very well to support Femto cell deployments with almost as many cells as there are subscribers, and a handful of subscribers per cell.
An alternative approach is to use UMA (or now called GAN). UMA was originally conceived to support dual mode cellular/WiFi-over-Internet type of connectivity. When the mobile is detected indoors within the range of pre-determined WiFi coverage, a UMA concentrator does the core network negotiation on behalf of the mobile, e.g. registering, and updating location ... etc. It is thought that a similar procedure can be used for femto cells. When the mobile is detected within the coverage of a femto cell, UMA kind of hand shaking takes place to ensure that: 1. the mobile is allowed to access the network at this particular femto cell, 2. the traffic between the mobile and the core network is forwarded accordingly. Using this method a UMA concentrator is required, so in a way, the solution is still hierarchical and it is certainly one of the criticisms of this method is that it is not a fully flat architecture. Kineto is one of the companies promoting this approach.
Yet another alternative approach is enabling femto cell connectivity through an IMS service. In this approach, the femto cell router talks SIP over the internet back to an IMS service which acts as a bridge between the femto layer and the rest of the network. Although this is considered the "flattest" approach, it is yet to understand how it will work in practice, the delay in working fully featured IMS platforms is one of the concerns of femto cell development companies.
Incidentally, my current clients are hedging their bets by supporting more than one approach and have developed partnerships with various companies in their respective fields to make the Femto architecture as flexible as possible.
Although the femto cell concept is quickly gaining grounds towards complete and operational products, there is still some misunderstanding on how the overall network architecture will look like. I'll try to address this issue in this post.
A femto cell router is a small device, the size of any Wi-Fi router, which is in effect a miniature base station. The radio is a standard based radio such as UMTS/HSPA which the operator will likely require a license to operate on. The router connects to a DSL line. The idea is to enable the subscriber to make and receive mobile calls indoors, with low signal levels which has a number of benefits to the operator:
- Hopefully accelerate fixed line substitution.
- Reduce the cost of building a full macro layer network.
- Lock subscriber in to the operator and reduce the likelihood of churn.
- Provide a viable medium for content distribution (the ugly walled garden paradigm)
It is not my intention here to argue for or against these benefits. I will dedicate a full post on the business case for the femto cell and the potential cons sometime soon. So let us stay on the technology side and try to investigate how a UMTS based femto cell routers will be integrated with the operator's core network.
Basically, there are a number of ways, the first of which is the conventional hierarchy using an RNC . Just like any node-b is connected back to an RNC which is then in turn is connected to the core network, the femtocell routers can be treated like individual node-bs and connect to RNCs. This may appeal to big manufacturers who already have substantial deployments and many RNC on the ground. The downside to this approach is the limited chances of inter-operable devices if the operators chooses to diversify their suppliers. Although the Iub interface (base station to RNC) is standardised, the reality is most implementations are proprietary. Typically operators don't like to put all their eggs in one basket and would prefer to get solutions from various suppliers. The other downside of this approach is that most available RNC solutions are geared towards Macro/Micro type of deployments. In other words they are built in order to support relatively small number of cells with a huge number of subscribers in each cell. They don't scale very well to support Femto cell deployments with almost as many cells as there are subscribers, and a handful of subscribers per cell.
An alternative approach is to use UMA (or now called GAN). UMA was originally conceived to support dual mode cellular/WiFi-over-Internet type of connectivity. When the mobile is detected indoors within the range of pre-determined WiFi coverage, a UMA concentrator does the core network negotiation on behalf of the mobile, e.g. registering, and updating location ... etc. It is thought that a similar procedure can be used for femto cells. When the mobile is detected within the coverage of a femto cell, UMA kind of hand shaking takes place to ensure that: 1. the mobile is allowed to access the network at this particular femto cell, 2. the traffic between the mobile and the core network is forwarded accordingly. Using this method a UMA concentrator is required, so in a way, the solution is still hierarchical and it is certainly one of the criticisms of this method is that it is not a fully flat architecture. Kineto is one of the companies promoting this approach.
Yet another alternative approach is enabling femto cell connectivity through an IMS service. In this approach, the femto cell router talks SIP over the internet back to an IMS service which acts as a bridge between the femto layer and the rest of the network. Although this is considered the "flattest" approach, it is yet to understand how it will work in practice, the delay in working fully featured IMS platforms is one of the concerns of femto cell development companies.
Incidentally, my current clients are hedging their bets by supporting more than one approach and have developed partnerships with various companies in their respective fields to make the Femto architecture as flexible as possible.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)