Femto Forum has published an operator friendly guide to the LTE femtocell architecture options in the 3GPP standard. The guide concludes that operators’ choices will be driven by their existing infrastructure, how quickly they want to roll out femtocells and how widely they plan to deploy them.

According to report, three femtocell architecture options outlined in the LTE standard comprehensively support a wide variety of operator deployment scenarios. It details what operators need to consider in order to make the most prudent architecture choice, based on their specific business and technology circumstances. It finds that operator choice should be dictated by how quickly they wish to bring a femtocell service to market, their current network architecture and how widely they intend to deploy femtocells in the longer term.

“Femtocells bring powerful benefits to LTE by ensuring that users receive the best possible experience and operators maximise their investment in the new networks. However, for operators planning to roll the technology out, there are several crucial architecture options that they need to get right in order to sweat their assets and deliver the kind of femtocell service that meets their needs,” said Professor Simon Saunders, Chairman of The Femto Forum.

“LTE femtocell endorsements and trials from operators including China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and Telefonica point to growing interest,” notes Peter Jarich, Mobile Ecosystem Service Director, with Current Analysis.

LTE femtocells provide important performance advantages by ensuring more users receive peak data rates more of the time, both inside buildings where the vast majority of mobile broadband data is consumed and outdoors through metropolitan and rural models. Femtocells also allow operators to create a more compelling LTE business case as they can considerably lower the delivery cost per bit through significant savings in cell site installation, maintenance and backhaul costs.