Netgear Develops Femtocell Residential Gateway

Netgear has announced the development of new residential gateway with 3G femtocell technology. This is a combined effort with Ubiquisys Ltd., a developer of ZoneGate femtocell technology. The residential gateway is integrated with various high ends of wire and wireless technology such as DSL, Wi-Fi and 3G as well as VOIP into a single box targeted for residential gateway market segment.

Femtocell, also known as Access Point Base Station is normally deployed in hot spots and in home for the digital convergence to take place. Ubiquisys brings its ZoneGate 3G Femtocell module to be integrated into Netgear’s Residential Gateway to extend the connectivity support for 3G network on conventional Residential Gateway. By having all these features in place, both Netgear and Ubiquisys are confident to capture more market shares in fixed mobile convergence markets.

Researchers forecast that the femtocell users will exceed 152 million subscribers by 2012. It is believed that Netgear and Ubiquisys collaboration is on the right timing and the total solution is expected to be available for commercial market in early of 2008.