Communications and Technology Industry Research

ABI Research has reportedly ranked Ubiquisys as the number one femtocell vendor all over the world for the second year running in its vendor matrix study released recently. 

The second position is still held by ip.access and Airvana has climbed from fifth position last year to third position this year. Huawei, too, has moved up to claim the fourth spot this year.

"Ubiquisys (News - Alert) has the momentum going for it at the moment with multiple operator trials and rollouts across the world. ip.access has seen its partnership and close relationship with Cisco (News - Alert) bear fruit,” said Aditya Kaul, Senior Analyst, ABI Research. “The firm has built upon its innovation and R&D expertise and is now in close competition with Ubiquisys.” Kaul adds that Airvana (News - Alert) is not too far behind ip.access since it has a modular approach that integrates with multiple form factors. 

Airvana is reportedly one of the foremost vendors in terms of supplies of femtocell devices to broadband service providers and its solutions have built in extensibility to accommodate rapid scale up with different devices.

ABI considers its vendor matrix an analytical tool and places innovation on the Y axis and implementation on the X axis grading both on a scale of one to ten. Ultimately both scores are correlated with respect to each other and a final co-ordinate score indicates the overall rating.

The scores are reportedly weighted and ranked for percentile comparisons, with extraordinary performances in either innovation or implementation lending more overall value. A good vendor is expected to have a co-ordinate score of at least 7 on both the X and Y axes.

Implementation considers start to finish workability, collaborations within the industry, request for proposal ability, prototyping, testing, validation, certification, planned installations including logistics, increase in production and delivery ability, relationships with service providers and chip industries, and finally the fiscal and organizational roadmaps.

Innovation considers cost, strategy for reduction of interference with base stations, adherence to standards, inter operability testing for gateways and handsets, number of bugs in the system, multiple communications systems support, and extensibility.

While a few femtocell vendors appear to be well positioned strategically, they face extremely challenging times and femtocells still appear to be just a buzzword, as reported by TMC (News - Alert).