The Femto Forum has successfully completed its second plugfest which focused on femtocell management. The series of plugfests aim to cultivate an effective ecosystem of standardised femtocells. This helps provide operators and consumers with a wider choice of femtocell products while also facilitating economies of scale which help bring down the cost of equipment. The plugfest had widespread vendor support with 13 companies participating, including vendors of network equipment and femtocell access points as well as component providers. 

The plugfest was organized in cooperation with ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and overseen by testing and compliance consultancy TRaC Global. The primary objective of the plugfest, organized as an ETSI Plugtests™ interoperability testing event, was to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard in supporting interoperability between femtocell access points and network equipment from different vendors. 

The Broadband Forum’s femtocell management standard (TR-196) was published in April 2009 and is an extension of the TR-069 standard that is widely used in fixed broadband networks and set-top boxes. The femtocell standard allows mobile operators to simplify deployment and enable automated remote provisioning and configuration, radio environment monitoring, diagnostics-checking and software updates.

The companies involved were Ablaze Wireless, Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent Telecom, Alpha Networks, Argela, Askey Computer Corporation, Huawei, Institute for Information Industry, NEC Corporation, Node-H, Nokia Siemens Networks, PicoChip and Ubiquisys.

Interoperability tests were conducted between femtocell access points, management systems, security gateways and femtocell network gateways to verify the Broadband Forum’s TR-196 femtocell management standard. The plugfest also tested the IPsec/IKEv2 security protocols which allow femtocells to communicate over the public Internet to operators’ core networks in a highly secure manner.