The first 3G femtocell deployment has been won by SoftBank

The implementation of a 3G femtocell service is to be started by SoftBank, the Japanese Communication operator, working with Ubiquisys, the British femtocell pioneers and equipment from NEC.

The commercial release of the system which will include femto gateways that will link together with an IMS core is set for January 2009. Long term partners in the popular and emerging femtocell market Ubiquisys (Swindon, England) and NEC are using its ZoneGate technology, which is popular in NEC’s systems.

Chris Gilbert, CEO of ubiquisys, said “The Japanese market has always led the world in mobile technology so it comes as little surprise that SoftBank is the first operator to deploy 3G femtocells. By quite literally turning their mobile network inside out, they are in the process creating a mobile broadband network with vastly more capacity and coverage than anything seen before.”

Claims have been made by Sprint, the US operator, that it is the first and only operator to date to offer its users femtocells, although they are currently only being used for voice services. Softbank is the third largest operator in Japan after KDDI and NTT DoCoMo, and managed to acquire Vodafone’s Japanese operation. The release of this service will be the first time there has been a rollout of 3G units into the wild.

A compact device that will connect to a standard home broadband device, the femtocell offers perfect mobile phone coverage either in the office or at home, faster mobile broadband, higher quality phone calls for less, and some brand new services. All of these features are used with existing mobile handsets.

SoftBank will be getting the femtocell system from NEC and it comes with an IMS configured with an SIP server, allowing independently controlled communications from femtocells. The femtocell system is designed to distribute transmission load across the whole mobile network irrespective of traffic load. It also helps to stop network congestion as traffic increases and femtocells spread. Due to its compatibility with IP-based networks that have migrated from backbone networks the IMS framework aids the building of all-IP networks for both fixed and mobile broadband communication.