The team at Pletronics have a very up to date view of what's going on today at many small cell vendors. As one of the two leading suppliers of specialist oscillator components to the industry, they have a birds-eye view of the types of products under development and some of the issues arising. While not divulging specific customer details, they shared some great insights into the state of the industry today. Residential femtocells showing steady rather than spectacular growth; LTE small cell designs needing refinement and a new requirement for 3G Metrocells.

I spoke with the team there including K. Claude Lee (President); Johanna (Joey) Warren (Director Global Accounts); Dave Kenny (Vice President Research & Development) and Robert Henry (Vice President Quality Engineering).

Nextivity have developed the Cel-Fi Booster, a simple to install device which improves indoor coverage. Unlike unmanaged repeaters, it is tied to a single network and can be remotely controlled by the host network operator. Here George Lamb, VP Operations at Nextivity, lifts the covers on the product, and forecasts strong market potential – especially in areas without wireline broadband where traditional small cells could not be used.

There are many analyst reports forecasting dramatic growth in the numbers of small cells. Rapid growth is predicted across all sectors. The quarterly Small Cell Forum market report lists several. I took the opportunity to ask Dimitris Mavrakis, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, who compiles the report for more insight into the assumptions and basis behind it.

Having just rebranded the Femto Forum into the Small Cell Forum, we met with Simon Saunders, Chairman, to learn how the repositioning has gone, find out what the new scope will mean and learn about their plans for the year ahead. With Small Cells bound to be one of the hottest topics at next week's Mobile World Congress, this work program addresses many of the top issues on network planners' minds today.

Quortus is a small software company with a unique product. They supply a complete 2G/3G core network that’s so small it can even run inside a femtocell. We asked Andy Odgers, CEO and founder, how this has come about, what use cases this approach has, and what he might develop in the future.

Dave Williams, until recently SVP of Wireless at Comcast, has now taken up the position of CTO at Stoke. Why did he move and what future does he envisage for his new employer? Here he shares his (slightly controversial) views about the change in approach to data equipment at operators, Stoke’s focus on 4G/LTE and what he thinks of Wi-Fi network solutions available today.

In this interview with Jerry Wei, Business Manager for MAXIM's wireless RF transceivers, he explains how MAXIM were involved in the early femtocell designs and are now included in the vast majority of today's commercial femtocells. With their second generation femtocell RF transceiver nearing commercial production, he reports confident growth in today's shipments, explains why the LTE Femtocell market will be different, and believes that ODMs will have a large part to play in the future.

I spoke to Nitin Pai, VP Marketing at Tata Elxsi, who have recently become more visible as an LTE femtocell software provider. He’s seen growing interest in LTE femtocells, uncovers how soon we’ll see commercial LTE femtocells in operation and discusses how the hardware chipset vendors are positioning in this emerging technology.

Since we last spoke with Manish almost a year ago, Continuous Computing have made further strides to increase their customer base for Trillium software stacks used to build femtocells. In this interview, Manish, who is currently their VP of Product Line Management, observes the changing eco-system of femtocell vendors and shares some insights into the rapidly evolving LTE femtocell development community.

Although this interview was held prior to the recent announcement that Radisys will buy Continuous Computing, we feel it is still appropriate to publish it. We'll be following up the implications for the new business once the deal has completed and their market strategy has been revised. It's worth noting however, that the new CEO of Radisys will be Mike Dagenais, the current Continuous Computing CEO.

We caught up with Anil Kohli, Head of NEC’s femtocell business, and asked him what had changed since we last spoke. NEC now has many trials and commercial deployments, with the use case spilling out from the original residential/consumer proposition to enterprise and outdoor. Anil told us how the deployment cycle time has shortened, believes that India offers great femtocell opportunities, but NEC is clearly concentrating on 3G femtocells worldwide rather than LTE technology at this stage.