InterDigital and Picochip announced a converged gateway architecture that melds a carrier Wi-Fi access point and a 3G femtocell in the same unit.
Using radio resource management and policy software, InterDigital said it can combine Wi-Fi and 3G technologies so that a carrier can use both access technologies at the same time. InterDigital said the combination means that a smartphone can receive data over both cellular and Wi-Fi networks simultaneously, and the converged gateway can aggregate the two connections to improve users' quality of service or segregate different applications over different radios.
A subscriber, for instance, could view a streaming video using the higher bandwidth Wi-Fi connection and use 3G with its enhanced security and billing for authentication and payment. In addition, two lesser performing channels can be combined to offer higher throughput and reliability to a user.
InterDigital's converged gateway solution runs on Picochip's picoXcell platform and integrates 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi with 21 Mbps Release 7 HSPA+, and will work with all of Picochip's small-cell products.
For more:
- see this release
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