Femtocells at Mobile Asia Congress

 This week saw the great and the good of the Asian mobile industry gather in Hong Kong for Mobile Asia Congress 2010. At this year’s event femtocells were again a hot topic with SoftBank Mobile discussing their market-leading free femtocell offering and NEC announcing that it has a femtocell trial in progress in India.

LTE was also a central topic at the show – with Hong Kong operator CSL announcing the roll-out of the network and a raft of other carriers announcing plans on deployments. At Ubiquisys we believe that femtocells will play a central role in these deployments, allowing operators to deliver targeted coverage for initial roll-outs and help offload the exponential growth in data traffic.

At the show we met with a wide range of operators and partners, discussing how our Femto-Engine system provides software to power the free femtocell model for mobile operators and provides hardware designs to consumer electronics manufacturers to incorporate femto functionality into a wider range of devices and form factors.

Ubiquisys-powered femtocells are the only ones that dynamically adapt to the constantly changing 3G radio environment.  This not only eliminates interference problems, but ensures a positive user experience that today's passive femtocells cannot match.  We clearly need to do a better job of getting this message out though, because the number one femtocell concern I heard at the event was.....interference.

As always the event was incredibly valuable and I look forward to attending again next year!

[Guest post by Richard Staveley, VP Business Development at Ubiquisys]

Broadcom acquisition confirms Percello's femtocell market share credentials

We at Ubiquisys were delighted by Broadcom's announcement to acquire Percello, the UMTS femtocell System on a Chip (SoC) supplier. 

Firstly it underwrites Percello's credibility by removing the concerns mobile operators have expressed over the supply chain aspects of boutique Private Equity backed SoC companies.

Secondly, the capability Broadcom brings to the mix, particularly in the consumer space, has the potential to significantly enhance the existing Percello femtocell SoC offering.

We at Ubiquisys selected Percello for our second generation of femtocell devices back in 2008, having done a thorough analysis of all femtocell SoC suppliers, and having concluded Percello offered the best in class SoC for UMTS femtocells in terms of performance, price and energy footprint. For our first generation of femtocells we used picoChip's SoC.

To produce a credible market share number for SoC in the UMTS femtocell sector the easiest approach is to look at the major deployments underway in US, Japan and Europe. Knowing the market well, our assessment is that Percello currently has approximately 50% of the UMTS SoC femtocell market.  This is likely to rise in 2011 even with the entrance in to this sector of Qualcomm.

Looking forward to LTE, pretty much all of the world-class System on a Chip suppliers have recognised the importance and exponential growth opportunities of the femtocell sector, so we can look forward to a healthy and competitive landscape in the coming years.