Next Tuesday at the Femtocells World Summit in London, chipmaker picoChip, packet core vendor Starent Networks, and Continuous Computing will give the first live demo of a new 3GPP standard critical to the deployment of IP Radio Access Network-based femtocells.

What's that again? 3GPP is the Third Generation Partnership Project, the international consortium that lays down specs for telecommunications standards. Femtocell is a system for increasing 3G cellular coverage with small, indoor distributed antenna systems. They are sort of like tiny cell towers, hence the femto- prefix which denotes 10^-15, making the name roughly mean "really really small cell."

The new standard that the companies will be showing off next week is called the Release 8 luh interface. In simple terms, a network is made up of a lot of individual elements connected together and sharing information (packets). They are connected by interfaces which have different names like "lub, lur, and lu-PS." See the theme there? luh connects the home femtocell radio network to the outside network. Specifically, it connects to the gateway which is then connected to either circuit switched- for voice and SMS- or packet switched networks.

This small piece of the cellular fabric is important because it allows a great number of tiny 3G radio networks to be linked together on gateways that are integrated into carriers' broader networks. For example, a five hundred room apartment building could conceivably have a femtocell radio in every room, and the Release 8 luh standard will let them all be connected to the same gateway.