By
Tim Young
The value proposition underlying fixed-mobile convergence has always been compelling, on the surface. Have a single handset, and a single bill. At home or in the office, use that handset on a home network, paying less, given the fact that your voice and data is being passed along by your broadband connection rather than crowding the wireless spectrum. Once you leave the familiar confines of your LAN, seamlessly pick up a wireless signal and carry on with your conversation. Neither you nor your conversation-buddy notice the switch, and you’ve got a communication device that ties the home and mobile experiences together in a mighty tidy fashion.
There doesn’t seem to be anything terribly wrong with that idea. It’s a brilliant solution to the problems of the modern communications consumer, right?
Well, that’s something we should probably tell a consumer and business market that’s never fully climbed on board with FMC.
Setbacks:
It’s not that the solutions don’t work.
The FMC Alliance; a trade association whose member companies include BT, Belgacom, China Telecom, Korea Telecom, Swisscom, and many others; has been trumpeting the virtues of fixed-mobile convergence since 2004, and as recently as October 23 issued a press release reporting a successful test of seamless mobility using the IEEE 802.21 standard.
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FMC is a brilliant solution to the problems of the modern communications consumer, right? |
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plans for lower price points, rendering any discussion of cost-savings to be gained from utilizing lower-cost fixed-broadband traffic utterly futile.
(I, for one, have unlimited talk time from my wireless carrier. It’s a low-priced loyalty plan that makes it utterly impractical for me to embrace FMC. Then again, I’m also highly unlikely to switch mobile providers, so the ‘loyalty’ aspect is working. But I digress.)
In the US, conversations from wireless carriers seem far more focused on retaining customers and offering more data plans than pushing FMC.
But that’s not the case in every market.
In South Korea, the Korean Times reported just a few weeks ago that “Convergence of
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However, there’s still reluctance in many markets for consumers to embrace FMC offerings. Femtocells, considered by many to be the key to fixed-mobile convergence adoption, have hardly been flying off of shelves. Perhaps that has to do with the economy, or perhaps that has to do with wireless providers offering all-you-can-talk
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Fixed, Mobile Phone Services [is] in Full Swing.” The report cited the fact that KT and SK Telecom were being joined by LG Telecom in a commitment to offering FMC solutions.
LG Telecom will be absorbing two other of LG’s telecom units, and the combined
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