Member companies come together to help drive small cell interoperability
London, UK, 19 February 2015. Small Cell Forum, in partnership with ETSI, has announced the first Small Cell LTE Remote Plugfest, taking place from 13 to 24 April 2015.
Small Cell Forum Plugfests play a key role in cultivating an effective ecosystem of interoperable small cells, helping to debug vendor implementations and drive the resolution of standards ambiguities and gaps. This all helps provide operators and consumers with a wider choice of small cell products while also facilitating economies of scale to bring the small cell mass market closer.
This is the first Plugfest to take place fully remotely, where participants will run test sessions from their own offices by connecting to a VPN based remote test infrastructure. To find out more and to register click here: http://www.etsi.org/small-cell-lte-plugfest
The main areas of focus of the LTE Remote Plugfest will be:
- LTE-A Carrier Aggregation
- Local IP Access (LIPA) and Selected IP Traffic Offload (SIPTO)
- Closed Subscriber Group (CSG)
“The work that takes place in the Plugfests is invaluable in accelerating the deployment of small cell networks,” said Kreso Bilan, Small Cell Forum. “Being able to do these remotely not only makes it easier for people to join, but also opens up a series of interesting new test possibilities. We’d encourage even more of our members and those in the industry to get involved and to help shape the future of small cell standards.”
“The well-established remote test infrastructure was set up at the beginning of the Plugfest series to support pre-testing phases and participation with remote equipment,” said Anthony Wiles, Director, ETSI Centre for Testing and Interoperability. “Since then, remote testing techniques and technology have been continuously improved to facilitate enrolment and secure interaction among participants. We’re excited to be a part of the first remote Plugfest and look forward to seeing how these develop.”
The Forum has conducted five previous Plugfests on topics including device interoperability, management and 3GPP standards. Background on Small Cell Forum Plugfests is available from http://scf.io/doc/085.
About the Small Cell Forum (SCF)
The Small Cell Forum (www.smallcellforum.org) supports the wide-scale adoption of small cells. Small cells are low-power wireless access points that operate in licensed spectrum, are operator-managed and feature edge-based intelligence. They provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and applications for homes and enterprises as well as metropolitan and rural public spaces. They include technologies variously described as femtocells, picocells, microcells and metrocells.
The Forum has in excess of 150 members including 68 operators representing more than 3 billion mobile subscribers – 46 per cent of the global total – as well as telecoms hardware and software vendors, content providers and innovative start-ups.
About the Release Program
Launched in February 2013 the Small Cell Forum Release Program provides a comprehensive set of technical and business documents to help deploy small cells in the home, enterprise, rural and urban areas. Each release includes detailed documents on key areas such as market drivers, business case, technology information including standards, operator lessons, and a regulatory overview.
The Release Program is driven by the knowledge that more than 98% of operators think small cells are essential to their future. Whilst existing deployments have centred on almost 50 pioneering large operators in developed markets, the Release Program aims to help every type of operator from across the globe to roll out small cells.
In 2015, the Forum will publish Release Five, themed around small cells for Rural & Remote deployments. View the roadmap here http://scf.io/doc/100
About ETSI
ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged, aeronautical, broadcast and internet technologies and is officially recognized by the European Union as a European Standards Organization. ETSI is an independent, not-for-profit association whose more than 700 member companies and organizations, drawn from 64 countries across five continents, determine its work programme and participate directly in its work.
For more information, visit: www.etsi.org.
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