Femto, WiMAX groups collaborate on femtocells

The Femto Forum and WiMAX Forum announced they plan to collaborate on the development of WiMAX Femtocell Access Point (WFAP) specifications that will address issues such as end-to-end QoS, provisioning, network entry and authentication, power optimization and mobility management.

Similar to the argument the Femto Forum made for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) community, the Femto Forum is positioning femtocells as a vehicle to dramatically increase coverage indoors while allowing for mobility and roaming across wide area networks. It's becoming clear WiMAX operators, like their LTE counterparts, need some way of aggregating cell throughput per unit area and improve the quality of intra-cell links. In other words, they need to deploy smaller cells. These technologies approach the theoretical maximum information transfer rate (otherwise known as Shannon's Law) and further improvements will only be possible by rolling out smaller cells.

"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 in a release. "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."

For more:
- see this release [1]

Related articles:
LTE femtocells [2] may be more about coverage than speed
WCDMA femtocell standard [3] official