Europe UK : Telefónica O2 Europe announced live femtocell experience trials in the UK in partnership with NEC Corporation and Ubiquisys, targeting a commercial launch of the technology by early 2009.

The UK’s first full trial of femtocell technology – which is a new way of improving in-building 3G coverage – has begun an initial period of live testing in February.  If successful, the trial will be rolled out in greater numbers across the UK in the summer.

NEC – a leading provider of 3G infrastructure and handsets, internet and broadband network solutions – is O2’s trial partner and has supplied an integrated solution centred around Ubiquisys ZoneGate femtocells.

Vivek Dev, Chief Operating Officer of Telefónica O2 Europe, said: “This technology has the potential to support increased growth in the usage and consumption of services and data and could play a crucial role in underpinning the explosive growth of mobile broadband usage.”

Dev added: “Our Apple iPhone is already driving unheard-of levels of mobile internet usage, and the introduction of flat rate data tariffs is expected to increase this further. Both of these place huge capacity demands on our networks, and because so much of that usage is at home, femtocells coupled with DSL could provide an alternative capacity resource.”

He said: “We see femtocells as complimentary to our outdoors coverage and, using our current service set as a base, we aim to build applications that our customers need and value.  The trial will help us define what is required to make femtocell services a success for our customers by understanding how customers will use the service.”

Richard Hanscott, VP Network Solutions Europe, NEC, said “O2, NEC and Ubiquisys have collective reputations for practical innovation, and with femtocells we believe we know what is important.  Together with our partner Ubiquisys, we have a proven radio, network and management solution which allows customers to deploy femtocells quickly and easily, and allows operators to manage these in a customer centric way.” 

He added: “O2 has always been an innovator and marrying this with their experience of harnessing true customer requirements, it allows NEC to leverage this experience to create a robust solution. We fully expect the commercialisation of Femtocells to begin in 2009 and look forward to seeing the results of the landmark trial.”

Chris Gilbert, CEO of Ubiquisys, said: “We are very happy to be working with Telefonica O2 Europe in this ground breaking trial which will take femtocell technology to the mass market.  Our ZoneGate femtocell is so simple to use that anyone can plug it in, it will automatically configure itself and work, so they can forget it’s there.”

Femtocells are designed to improve indoor 3G mobile-broadband coverage by re-routing data from cellular networks and onto wired DSL connections, building cellular coverage from the inside out.  O2 also launched trials in the Czech Republic this month, on the back of successful tests that have been carried out in Madrid by Telefónica since last year.