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company will be releasing their FMC offerings in January.  "The market for mobile groupware, which allows business users to handle e-mail and e-commerce on a single handset, is expanding with significant interest from companies,” and LG spokesperson told The Korea Times. “And there is no doubt that FMC services will be a key element of the mobile groupware package."

If it’s any indication of the fluctuations in corporate policy concerning FMC SK Telecom CEO Jung Man-won issued statements just a week later (covered in a separate report in the same paper) that tempered any sense of his company’s bullishness on FMC, somewhat.  "A type of Internet telephony service, allowing users to switch between fixed-lines and mobile networks using a single handset,” Jung told The Korea Times, “can't be the right answer as an alternative cash-cow. As a result, SK Telecom won't strike a merger with its wireless unit SK Broadband for a considerable period of time.”

So, even in FMC’s boom markets, nothing is guaranteed. 

Changing how we look at FMC:

The problem, in many ways, with FMC is that it has been approached, historically, in ways that are promising, glossy, and futuristic, but entirely too complicated.  BT Fusion and other similar services tanked because, in part, they were thought of by many consumers as a solution in search of a problem.  Talking at home or in the office for little or no cost is an attractive proposition, but when users are socialized to pay for minutes, have plentiful VoIP solutions at their disposal (including ultra-low-cost offerings like Skype), and are generally wary of purchases of services or hardware that they find to be entirely unnecessary, they won’t bite. 

There is an FMC approach that requires minimal hardware/software and will become easier to implement with every new smartphone that ships.  UMA/GAN (Unlicensed Mobile Access is the brand name, Generic Access Network is the… well… generic name) is an example of a system that incorporates a seamless handoff between WLANs and WANs using a GSM/WiFi dual mode handset.

Given that some estimates number the volume of WiFi-enabled smartphones shipped in 2009 to be over 100 million, the major hardware requirement for UMA/GAN is already in place.  It could, ostensibly, mean that femtocells truly are irrelevant and that WiFi is all the answer users need for FMC.

and even with more towers being constructed all the time, and even with more efficient 4G technologies becoming more real every day, we’re reaching a point where there is simply too much data being squeezed onto the wireless spectrum. 

All-you-can-eat voice and data plans are drawing customers, but as more take advantage of these values, we could easily reach a tipping point at which the network becomes virtually unusable to everyone due to sheer overcrowding.  By routing some of this massive traffic through WiFi and, therefore, wired networks, some of the strain is taken off of the wireless network.  That’s a great reason for FMC solutions and any other technology that can spread the strain.

Bringing it all Together:

In the end, it’s tough to predict the fate of converged fixed-mobile offerings.  At present, it seems that the offerings with the most staying power are those that don’t attempt to make too many sweeping changes to usage patterns, user-experience, or other key elements on the customer end.  Less hardware and more flexibility is a good thing.  In the end, FMC is probably more of an essential item than many consumers realize.  The key for providers is to find ways to make the FMC experience seem as painless for the customer as the mobile experience has come to be.