Seventeen manufacturers have so far adopted the Femto Forum APIs for their upcoming LTE products including Airvana, AirWalk Communications, Broadcom, Cisco, Freescale, ip.access, mimoOn , Mindspeed, Picochip, Radisys, Tata Elxsi, Texas Instruments and Ubiquisys amongst others. Additionally, SK Telecom has also implemented the APIs in its LTE femtocell deployment. The LTE APIs enable interoperability between LTE femtocell semiconductors and protocol software from different vendors.

According to Femto Forum, this rapid adoption is being driven by widespread LTE small cell commitments from operators around the world including China Mobile, Vodafone, SK Telecom and NTT DoCoMo.

Informa Telecoms & Media recently reported that 60% of operators believe small cells are more important than macrocells in LTE deployments. Small cells were also the comfortable winner in a Rethink Research survey of the most important features for LTE-Advanced.

The APIs address three fundamental functions: Physical Layer control (to generate LTE radio signals), scheduling (to accurately assign packets to frequency and time slots) and network monitoring (to minimize interference with the macro network and optimize femtocell coverage). Crucially, the APIs support vendors’ unique approaches to these three key areas, which essentially differentiate their products, while helping ensure their solutions are compatible with all other femtocell components.