Cambridge UK and Richardson Texas, 7 February 2008 – ip.access (www.ipaccess.com), the market leader in picocell and femtocell infrastructure solutions, and Mavenir Systems (www.mavenir.com), an innovator in service delivery network technology, today announced a partnership to deliver new “femtozone” services for mobile phones.

Beyond improving mobile voice and data quality in homes and offering attractive tariff packages, femtocells hold the promise of enabling brand new services on mobile phones in the home environment and extending fixed mobile convergence (FMC) capabilities. Operators will now be able to deliver the innovative applications desired by consumers, with dynamic selection across mobile, IMS or Web 2.0 service domains.

Typical examples would include parents being able to receive SMS alerts when family members enter or depart the home; presence information updating automatically on social networking sites; and subscribers having a virtual home number which rings all mobiles, traditional phones or PC clients currently in the femtozone at home.

Femto Forum members ip.access and Mavenir Systems are working together to make these new services a reality through the integration of Mavenir’s Femto Zone solutions, based on the Intelligent Convergence Engine (Mavenir ICE™) technology, with ip.access’ multi-award winning Oyster 3G™ femtocell system. Both companies’ technologies are currently in trials with operators globally.

Analysts agree about the importance of femtozone services. “While femtocells are emotionally appealing to mobile operators, creating viable business models is challenging, if they add no more value than just improved coverage or lower-priced calls at home,” said Dean Bubley, wireless industry expert and founder of Disruptive Analysis. “Adding new and innovative ???at home’ features for customers should broaden the opportunity significantly – although this requires much better integration with application-layer intelligence in the network”.