Femto Forum develops Wi-Fi offload technologies

The Femto Forum is developing mobile operator Wi-Fi offload technologies underscoring the fact that Wi-Fi and femtocells will co-exist  and communicate simultaneously within the same device.

The forum aims to develop guidelines and interfaces that will enable the mobile network to make decisions over what's routed to Wi-Fi rather than having devices switch over to an access point and disappear from the network,  Andy Germano, the forum's vice chair, told Connected Planet. Keeping a consistent signaling connection over the cellular network means an operator can decide the best network certain traffic should travel over.

The forum is hoping that converged Wi-Fi access point/femtocell will become a super offload hotspot and it is also working with other groups in 3GPP to make the standard node independent to allow devices to communicate simultaneously with the macro network and the Wi-Fi network.

For more:
- see this Connect Planet article

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