Swindon, UK – 17th October 2011 - Network Norway, the provider of professional mobile business solutions, began offering enterprise femtocells to its customers in Q1 2011. Six months after the commercial launch, the Full Coverage mobile enterprise solution has justified the operator’s innovation and proved the value of Ubiquisys’ femtocell grid system.

The femtocell solution marks a dramatic shift from the traditional picocell and Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) which have typically been used in large enterprises. These traditional systems provide indoor coverage using specialist equipment and require an expert radio engineering project in order to be deployed. Network Norway was looking for a solution to effectively deliver enterprise mobility to smaller companies, branches and depots.

“Our customers cover a wide range of small and medium businesses in a variety of different building types. They told us they wanted the benefits of increased workforce productivity and employee satisfaction that come from going mobile, but without the complexity and the cost of existing systems,” said Tom Guldberg, CSO of Network Norway.

“We teamed-up with NEC to build a solution based on the Ubiquisys ActiveSONTM enterprise grid system. It delivers high quality indoor mobile coverage in any size or shape of building with no radio engineering and no local controller to drive up the cost. It’s enterprise mobility made simple – just plug in some femtocells to your existing LAN and within minutes you have a complete high performance 3G HSPA network.”

Network Norway launched its Full Coverage solution in February 2011 after running extensive user trials for a year. The systems are installed by a network of dealers, using similar IT skills to those needed to install Wi-Fi access points.

The operator has also built on its innovation by offering the solution in conjunction with its Mobile Business offering, a smartphone app-based mobile centrex which enables companies to dispense with their fixed line phone systems, whilst retaining all of the useful features like conferencing and call management.

“Customer feedback has been very positive, mainly because the installation is simple and the network is completely automatic in operation, providing seamless mobility and load-balancing. Shared offices, production units, logistics depots – we have enabled every kind of business to go mobile. It’s a very scalable solution too – at the moment our largest grid is ten cells, but the absence of a central controller means that the economics work from 2 to 200+ cells. When you consider that each femtocell covers an area significantly larger than the area of a Wi-Fi access point, we are not just meeting the needs of small business, but providing a simple, elegant solution for larger enterprises too.”

“Network Norway leads the world when it comes to innovation in enterprise solutions,” said Chris Gilbert, CEO of Ubiquisys. “The simplicity and sheer flexibility of their Full Coverage solution points to a future where all enterprises can harness the benefits of enterprise mobility.”

Network Norway’s pioneering deployment of enterprise femtocells is a move which has since been followed by Orange France, with several other operators currently in preparation mode.