Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 1
This Month's Issue:
Come Together:
Fixed-Mobile Convergence
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Who's Your Daddy?
The Characteristics and Drivers of FMC

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At its root, we find FMC is the result of several conflicting trends:

  • The consumer’s desire for simplicity while still getting many services.

  • The wired operator’s desire to stem the erosion to mobile-only customers.

  • The device power efficiency and the service efficiency gained by choosing the highest bandwidth or cheapest network technology within reach of a device.

  • The desire of consumers to integrate and simplify their lives and have their priorities reflected in a personalization of their every consumer device.

  • And of course, the old BSS stand by: one bill.

So, where are we headed?

We asked Alan Quayle [alanquayle.com] an early entrepreneur in service product invention for FMC. Alan tells us that FMC is off to a rocky start:

“Fixed mobile convergence has not had the greatest start with respect to market acceptance. BT Fusion has struggled with consumer adoption, and both Deutsche Telekom and Korea Telecom have closed down their T-One and OnePhone services respectively. Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning of FMC? A common theme to these services was a technology-led approach, where because a new technical enabler was possible a new service was launched on that enabler. “

Nevertheless, there are clear early successes as well:

“Looking beyond fixed mobile convergence for voice services, we are seeing success in content and bundled services. For example; H3G (UK) is the number two music download site in the UK with a music download service to both the PC and mobile handset, with innovative use of their customer knowledge for targeted marketing of the music download service. Bundling of voice and video services is making good business for the cable operators in the US, where the proposition is quite simply saving money. “

Alan concludes:

“The common themes we are witnessing for service success is the important of delivering substantial value to the customer through targeting, savings and / or convenience. Perhaps FMC should be viewed as just another technology enabler, and our focus should be on finding services with substantial customer value.”

Ultimately, big expensive solutions with centralized control of service, data, presence, and connectivity are going to be under extreme competitive pressure from simpler distributed technologies. The industry may be fighting this trend, but it is a battle that can only be won in the short term. The war may very well go to distributed Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] technology.

Lots of questions remain. For example: how will game systems evolving to home control and access points play into this? Will emerging service uses for phone, like authenticating purchases or displaying a virtual ticket drive FMC or just mobile conversion from landline?

Requirements for OSS & BSS

Since it is not yet clear yet how FMC will evolve, it is hard to pin down how it will be managed. Even without knowing the details, it is clear that the FMC network and the advanced services which it enables will be very complex to manage. Detailed billing will be extremely complex to represent in a statement. Perhaps even more challenging will be billing between the service providers and the content providers – thousands of content providers. Handling disputes about quality of services delivered and breaches of the underlying service level agreements with each content provider could add thousands of dollars to the cost per customer account. Then add in the requirements to offer and manage things like parental control; allocation of budget per service; and transfers of budget allocations between members of a family or group – in real time. We are just beginning to see where all of the short comings are in our current OSS/BSS capabilities.

“One of the major steps that operators owning separate fixed and mobile divisions have begun is to merge the two divisions at several layers: technology strategy, corporate strategy, back-office functions, customer care and billing, and sales and marketing. Integrated operators have an advantage in owning both fixed and mobile infrastructure, but also face an enormous challenge if those divisions have been managed separately with different financial targets and working methods.” [IDC, CG29M] So to, these divisions have completely different OSS/BSS infrastructures and Operations departments. They use very different process with wildly different service delivery time expectations. A new home owner cannot walk out of a store with a house phone and expect it to be operational on a network by the time they arrive home to plug it in… but this happens thousands of times a day with mobile operators.


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