Looking to catch the forecast upsurge in femtocell deployments has seen French-based Bewan Systems launch a new femtocell unit that 
also includes Wi-Fi capabilities. The company, which has a track-record of developing networking products, claims that its new iBox home gateway supports 3G, 802.11g and ADSL in a single unit that overcomes the heat dissipation problems encountered with earlier products from competitors.
According to Bewan, its iBox home gateway--which has been nominated for an award at a femtocell event this week--will prove attractive to operators wanting to reduce the cost and complexity of installation for consumers by significantly reducing the number of cables and devices involved with home access points.
This move by Bewan coincides with a new study from Juniper Research claiming femtocell access points will increase to multi-million unit quantities over the next two to three years. With continued growth in the developed nations in North America, the Far East and China and Western Europe, these regions together will account for 90 per cent of service revenues by 2014.
As part of further indications that suggest femtocells are becoming more stable, three companies (Starent Networks, picocells and Continuous Computing) have conducted demonstrations this week of the 3GPP Iuh standard, which is a key part of the femtocell community's standards drive. The three firms claim they are the first to validate the Iuh 3GPP standard.
For more on this story:
See this press release or
Information Week and The Telecom
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