PETALUMA, California and CAMBRIDGE, England, February 6 /PRNewswire/ --

- Achieves Instant High Availability for Emerging Consumer Market Solution

ip.access Ltd., a leading developer of in-building wireless picocell and femtocell solutions, and OpenClovis Inc., provider of the premier open source, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) application service platform for the telecommunications industry, today announced that ip.access has incorporated the OpenClovis Application Service Platform (ASP) into the 3G Access Controller of its Oyster 3G for fixed mobile convergence.

The recently announced Oyster 3G Access Point System is a femtocell-based solution for providing optimal 3G and high-speed data coverage within the home. The Oyster 3G is a small low power consumer device that can be attached to an existing broadband connection in a residence or small office. It forms part of the operator's network and provides excellent coverage for both voice and data.

"Femtocells, such as our Oyster 3G, are much smaller and more cost effective than traditional base stations, but have the same requirements for High Availability," said Nick Johnson, CTO, ip.access. "The OpenClovis 'best in class' embedded middleware added instant High Availability to our product, helping us quickly to achieve carrier grade availability compliant to the SAF standard, and the ability to differentiate and scale our solution as operators migrate to an all IP and IMS future."

Femtocells -- also known as 3G access points -- are small cellular base stations designed for use in residential or small business environments. Femtocells offer cellular carriers the opportunity to address fixed mobile convergence markets with a highly attractive and efficient solution. Femtocell technology also provides improved reception of in-building wireless and data coverage, while eliminating the need for the complexity and costs of implementing WiFi in dual-mode handsets.

A recent study from ABI Research forecasts that by 2011, there will be 102 million users of femtocell products on 32 million access points worldwide.

"Smaller base stations and more distributed wireless networks will play a larger and larger part of the mobile future," said V.K. Budhraja, CEO, OpenClovis. "We are excited to be able to add real value to this emerging market. OpenClovis' robust yet small-format, standards-based, high availability and manageability embedded software is perfect for ip.access' small, low-cost femto3G."

The OpenClovis ASP consists of an extensive set of management software modules running on a distributed, model-driven core infrastructure, and is aligned with the Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) Application Interface Specifications for high availability. Modules may be selected to best match the application and platform requirements. The OpenClovis ASP can be distributed across blades, shelves, and even racks, creating a seamless high availability platform and system management environment across heterogeneous network element building blocks.

The OpenClovis ASP is suitable for a wide range of carrier grade network elements, and its usage ranges from broadband access devices for technologies such as DSL, PON, 3G/WiMAX, to metro Ethernet and edge switches/routers, IPTV application servers and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core elements.

OpenClovis products are offered and supported under a dual GNU Public License (GPL) open source and commercial license model. The open source version of the products is available for download at http://www.openclovis.org.

About OpenClovis

OpenClovis (www.openclovis.com) provides the premier open source, commercial-off-the-shelf application service platform for the telecommunications industry. The company reduces the cost of developing telecommunications equipment and accelerates time to market by providing developers with a flexible, standards-based software platform available under both open source and commercial licenses. With OpenClovis, telecommunication and network equipment manufacturers can quickly and easily add a management and high availability platform on which to build their differentiated applications. OpenClovis has received investment backing from American River Ventures, AT&T, Intel, Sevin Rosen Funds and Walden International. The company has partnerships with HP, IBM and other industry leaders.

About ip.access

Based in Cambridge, UK, ip.access ltd (www.ipaccess.com) is the leading manufacturer of cost-effective picocellular GSM, GPRS and EDGE and 3G infrastructure solutions, which integrate with standard broadband IP networks for backhaul. ip.access systems are live in over 18 networks around the world and many more are in the process of being deployed.

The femto3G(TM) product range enables mobile network operators to provide improved residential 3G voice and data coverage and deliver a pure-play cellular approach to fixed-mobile convergence.

The nanoGSM(R) product range provides low-cost GSM coverage and capacity, to improve service quality in offices, shops and residential buildings. ip.access picocells can also provide coverage on passenger aircraft, ships and in remote rural areas using satellite backhaul.

ip.access counts Scottish Equity Partners, Intel Capital, Rothschild Gestion and Motorola among its shareholders.

Web site: http://www.openclovis.com

Peter Kalenak of OpenClovis, Inc., +1-707-796-7131, or peter@openclovis.com; or Robert Hayward of Resonates SLM Ltd., +44-(0)-8700-110-520, or ip.access@resonates.com, for ip.access, Inc.