Thursday, August 8, 2013

What is LIPA?

Local IP Access (LIPA) is the ability for an IP-enabled device to access a consumer’s home-based local area network as well as the broader Internet directly using the air interface of a femtocell, or Home NodeB (HNB). Using LIPA allows for greater performance, innovative services that mesh mobile and home networks, and the off-loading of traffic from the operator’s packet core network which is ultimately destined for the Internet.
 
Why LIPA?
As connected device (i.e., mobiles, laptop data cards, USB dongles, etc.) penetration increases globally, more and more users are using their mobile devices not just for voice but also for data services. Today’s high-speed mobile broadband access technologies—
including Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) and Long Term Evolution (LTE)—are ensuring that users have the dual benefits of high mobility and high speed data access. The ever-increasing content available online via email, social networking sites, blogs, RSS feeds, multimedia calls, streaming video and online music coupled with faster and higher capacity equipment driven by personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and netbooks have led to a boom in the demand for Internet data access using high-speed mobile network infrastructure.