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Last week we conducted a webinar – "Breaking the Form Barrier – Evolution of LTE & Enterprise Femtocells" – that generated a lot of incisive questions about the implementation challenges and solutions for next generation femtocells. We received more questions than we were able to answer in the time we, so the Aricent experts that led the webinar, Sanjiv Kapur and Siddhartha Bhakta, have gone through the unanswered ones with responses below.

Please click here to view the recorded webinar, you can also find out more about Aricent’s femtocell offering at www.aricent.com/femtocell

Q: How will CDMA be incorporated in next generation femtocells?

A: LTE and other next generation telecommunication technologies will need to co-exist with older technologies such as UMTS, CDMA and GERAN, etc. Deploying stand-alone solutions supporting individual technologies can be prohibitively expensive for both operators and subscribers.

Multi-mode femtocells - capable of supporting multiple technologies simultaneously - provide a solution for deploying these technologies to ensure that expenses are kept under control. These femtocells will provide support for LTE and one or more older technologies based on the operator’s requirements.

Q: How can interference be reduced when macrocells and femtocells need to use the same carrier?

As everyone scrambles to define a Customer Experience Management service, it’s important to understand that one-off solutions won’t work. Companies still have to consider backend business functions to get an overall perspective of the customer experience.

Everyone from large OEMs to niche startups are announcing new services for Customer Experience Management (CEM). The market is flooded with new platforms and tools that claim to be “the ultimate solution” to the best user experience. From the point of view of someone who has seen this evolve from a coffee table debate over the past few years to something that is capturing everyone’s active imagination, it’s a fascinating development. It also warrants a word of caution:  To succeed, companies need to define what, exactly, real need is, and they need to establish the right framework to achieve that.

We live in a unique cellphone bubble in North America: We are the only region in the world where the majority of people get their cell phone service with a subscription. Here, prepaid phones are a fringe minority, relegated to lower-income populations, very infrequent users, and loaner phones. But in the rest of the world, prepaid phones vastly outnumber subscriptions, in some cases by 5-10x.

[This is a followup to an earlier post on the Myths of Agile Testing.]

Following up on our first webinar on successfully conducting testing in an Agile development environment, we ran a second webinar for Europe. This again generated more questions than we could answer in the webinar itself, so we've collected and answered these below, we hope they are informative for those of you seeking to better employ testing in your Agile projects.

In a talk earlier this year to employees, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop asked a question that many were probably afraid to answer truthfully, given how Nokia is struggling to combat the iPhone. As BusinessWeek described it:

When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. "That upsets me, not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I'd rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we're up against."

This is refreshing statement; many executives would have berated their employees for not keeping the faith while a company faced its biggest crisis.