Ubiquisys accelerates femtocell gateway market with Netopia TR-069 NBBS software
Netopia, a leader in broadband service assurance solutions, and Ubiquisys, the developer of ZoneGate mass-market femto access points for the residential market, today announced the two companies will collaborate to accelerate the development of the femtocell market.
Femtocells are cellular access points for mobile operators looking to provide enhanced 3G mobile coverage within homes and small businesses. Cellular access points, like the Ubiquisys ZoneGate system, made possible through sophisticated radio frequency planning techniques, are receiving strong interest from mobile operators globally. The devices are sold and deployed by mobile operators and sit on a customer's home network, behind a broadband gateway.
According to the 2006 study Femtocell Access Points: Fixed-Mobile Convergence for Residential, SMB, and Enterprise Markets by ABI Research, by 2011 there will be 102 million users of femtocell products on 32 million access points worldwide.
Key to sustainable, mass-market femtocell adoption is the requirement for an advanced service activation and management technology. To deliver such a system, Ubiquisys is enhancing its ZoneGate access point to support the TR-069 specification and is working with Netopia to create a zero-touch, fully managed software solution that uses Netopia's NBBS TR-069 platform. NBBS is a standards-based management system that supports the DSL Forum's TR-069 specification for the remote management of customer premises equipment.
"Ubiquisys has adopted the DSL Forum's TR-069 specification because it enables operators to seamlessly install and manage millions of ZoneGate access points in customers' homes," said Chris Gilbert, CEO of Ubiquisys. "Working with Netopia is a logical next step for us, since it allows us to offer mobile operators best-in-class femtocell technology through the fully managed ZoneGate access point."
The ZoneGate access point will be shipped to customers with an active SIM card. Once connected to a customer's home network, the access point will first authenticate with the wireless carrier, and then connect to the Netopia NBBS management server hosted by the mobile operator. Based on the customer's service profile, the appropriate configurations will then be automatically downloaded to the access point. Finally, the access point will be tuned to the optimal settings for the particular home environment, and the customer's individual account will be activated. This all occurs without the intervention of either the mobile operator or the customer.
"Our goal is to offer service providers complete service activation and management systems for home networks," said Jeff Porter, vice president of NBBS sales. "Today we have several million broadband gateways actively managed by our NBBS software. Supporting Ubiquisys allows us to expand our remote management footprint to include the emerging femtocell market opportunity."
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