Taiwan’s First Femtocell Network Installment by Alcatel-Lucent

Alcatel-Lucent has been awarded a Femtocell contract from Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom, to deploy Taiwan’s first femtocell network, which will enhance the coverage of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile network inside homes and offices.

Alcatel-Lucent will supply Chunghwa Telecom with an end-to-end solution including its Base Station Router (BSR) Femto – which incorporates 3G W-CDMA radio access and core network elements into one unit. The deployment will include the company’s service routers and Home Device Manager fromMotive, now part of Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio. Additionally, Alcatel-Lucent will be responsible for deployment, project management and end-to-end network integration for the project.

According to figures from the Mobile World subscriber tracker, Chunghwa Telecom ended September with just under 8.9 million customers - representing a market share of around 37%.

Alcatel-Lucent’s BSR Femto will use subscribers’ current broadband internet connection to transport voice and data traffic between the individual base stations and Chunghwa Telecom’s existing network, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional backhaul methods.

The BSR Femto offers another key benefit to operators, which is its patented auto-configuration approach. This enables service operators to deploy and more easily manage large numbers of small, stand-alone base stations, which helps reduce the operational burden on operators while helping to ensure a simple, relatively trouble-free experience for end-users.