Kineto Wireless, the UMA evangelist, is out to convert the Femtocells. Although Femtocells do not really exist yet, but this new breed of cpe devices could give FMC the much needed push in the market. Femtocells, as you might know, do not require you to have a dual mode phone in order to use FMC services.
Femtocell market started to come to life 18 months ago. The challenge is how to integrate potentially millions of Femtocells back into the mobile network. The existing standards are not sufficient to do that. The existing protocol called Iu is more like the early version of SIP in that there are various vendor specific flavors. So the service provider could potentially get locked into a particular solution. And that is not what operators want from Femtocell market. It has to be an open standard thing like the WiFi routers.
Kineto explored how UMA could be applied to Femtocells. It turns out that UMA is a natural fit, according to Kineto. You can run a UMA client in a Femtocell back to the UMA controller connected to the public Internet. From the Femtocell to the handset there is a standard 3G protocol. So you can use a standard 3G handset. This is not WiFi router stuff where your handset requires a WiFi radio in it. You can use a standard 3G phone.
Here comes the technical bit …. in case you can’t have enough of it …. The RAN gateway, the box that goes in the core network, does have a standard interface (Northbound) into the mobile core and it uses this Iu protocol. (Southbound) the connection between the RAN gateway and the Femtocell itself is the subject of debate. Should that be UMA or something else? All the big vendors want to see something other than UMA. Kineto’s message is ‘cement the existing structure’ and use something that is already a standard instead of creating a new specification.