Who can resist Paris in July? Certainly not 65 engineers from 27 companies that came together for Plugfest 2014, working towards greater interoperability and economies of scale in order to bring to bring the small cell mass market closer.

It was our fifth Plugfest in partnership with ETSI and hosted at the Orange Labs in Paris 23 June – 2 July. It was great to see so many new and familiar faces – in fact, our attendance almost doubled from last year.

It was the second year we had focused exclusively on LTE small cells. Testing concentrated on S1, X2 and management interfaces (HeMS) and covered areas such as Regression Testing, Handover, Mobility (Outbound, Inbound), Voice Support via Circuit Switch Fall Back (CSFB) schemes, Voice over LTE, and Mobile Alerting System (CMAS). As well as testing small cell/macro handover and security gateways another focus was the testing of multi-vendor SON in heterogeneous networks.

The event benefited from an enormous amount of pre-planning. All participants were able to conduct pre-test integration for the month before the event. Through remote connectivity, all participants had a chance to mitigate connectivity problems in the Plugfest lab. Performing these test cases remotely prior to the event helps to concentrate the Plugfest itself and help ensure a good rate of successful test case execution.

The companies involved were: Airspan Networks, Airvana, Alcatel-Lucent, Broadcom, Casa Systems Inc., Cavium, Cisco Systems, Com4Innov, Contela Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., ip.access, Ixia, JDSU, NEC, Node-H GmbH, One2Many, Orange, Public Wireless Inc., PureWave Networks Inc., Qosmotec, Qucell, Quortus Ltd., Radisys India Pvt Ltd., Sistel Networks, SMEC Co., Ltd. and Stoke. The event is also supported by the European Commission and the NGMN Alliance.

Watch this space for more news on the outcomes of the event.