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You are here: Home Vendors Femtocells Standalone Ubiquisys
Ubiquisys
Written by David Chambers   
Tuesday, 04 September 2007 09:39

Ubilogogif Private company startup formed in 2004, based in Swindon, UK and now one of the leading independent vendors. They demonstrated a 3G femtocell in February 2006 and launched the Zonegate product in Feb 2007. Unlike some other independent vendors they do not offer solutions for other radio technologies (2G, WiFi etc) and do not provide their own femtocell gateway. Their products are sold mainly through partnerships with NEC and NSN.

History

It has a strong approach to partnership, and have announced successful interworking with other vendors including Kineto Wireless, Nokia-Siemens femto gateway and others. It's femtocells form the core part of NEC's femtocell solution which has been trialled and commercially deployed with many networks. Their femtocell also interworks with Nokia Siemens femtogateway, and has been selected by them for OEM resale. Its partnership portfolio also includes Tatara and Mavenir who both provide mobile converged services solutions across mobile and IP networks.

It announced the choice of the picoChip modem as the basis of its design in April 2006, but switched to Percello (now part of Broadcom) in 2009.

During 2007, it teamed up with NetGear to produce a complete Femtocell Home Gateway. This residential gateway incorporates DSL broadband modem, WiFi, VoIP and 3G Femtocell. This was visibly demonstrated and shown at Mobile World Congress, where the product manager gave a timeframe of 3 months to "spin" the product to meet specific operator customisations (physical format/colour/software branding etc.) The DSL modem is ADSL2+ capable and includes all the common DSL modem capabilities in addition to the 3G UMTS femtocell.

Verified with Motive's Home Device Manager using TR-069 standards for remote management of (originally DSL Modem) consumer devices in December 2007.

The devices were originally manufactured by Sony Technium, who have the facilities to scale up production to large quantities on demand. More recently Ubiquisys have been working with several ODM vendors in the Far East, specifically SerComm, who focus on high volume manufacturing at low cost. This has allowed them to achieve low hardware production price points and the proven ability to scale up to high volumes.

After successful trials, was awarded a contract from Softbank , Japan (via NEC as prime contractor) for IMS architecture based femtocells in September 2008, for commercial launch in January 2009.

Selected by SFR France for the commercial launch in December 2009 (again with NEC as prime contractor).

 

Ubiquisys-G3mini

 

Their G3 model shown on the left (based on the Percello PRC6500 chipset) was adopted by NEC. Announced in February 2010, the product will be fully commercially available in April. Sized at 8cm tall, the unit can handle up to 8 concurrent calls and HSPA data rates of 14.4Mbits download and 5.7Mbit/s uplink.

An even small version of the product, the G3 Micro Mini, is shown on the right.Ubiquisys-G3micromini

Investors in Ubiquisys include Google, bringing the total investment in the company to $37M, with the second round of $25M completing in July 2007. T-Mobile Ventures took a stake in the business in February 2008.

Winner of the 2007 IET Innovation in Engineering Awards, Telecommunications.

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