FMC: Mixing the Right Blend of What?
I was flipping through my latest copy of America Telecommunications when I almost overlooked yet another article on Fixed Mobile Convergence - the hype is starting to bore me. I stopped only because the call out quote seemed too cynical for traditional marketing spin. Don’t get to excited, not despite his tries, the author was not able to get any insiders to admit anything negative on the topic. In fact they took him down a road of unconnected tangents.
Content? That was the differentiator that will separate FMC providers from being walled gardens. Huhh? I get whole IP leveled the playing field theme enabling over-the-top apps, but what does content have to do with FMC. And it gets worse, FMC is IMS and IMS is FMC. I sure hope that IMS brings more opportunity than just FMC. Here is my take.
Are you willing to pay more for FMC? Lets add up the positives, you get a dual mode handset that uses WiFi when you are indoors for the voice. After all 80% of wireless calls are made indoors, what a savings on infrastructure for the service provider. So you exchange your weak licensed signal for a potentially stronger unlicensed one. A perfect match assuming that you have no other devices running in the unlicensed spectrum, that your neighbors Pringle can booster antenna is not pointing at your house, your kids are not streaming HD already on your broadband (snicker- what broadband!) and that you had a PhD perform an RF coverage test to place supplemental access points in the dead spot in your garage. And if you haven’t done all of this, don’t worry, the service provider will just do a truck roll with a technician who will kindly help correct anything I missed.
On a more serious note, I would look forward to, and potentially even pay a premium if I could get features like integrated services with presence and directories - a slim possibility given that one of the features required to enter the FMC market is to have cellular emulation, that is the emulation of those star codes you can never remember. How much feature innovation comes from preserving star codes on a new $500 dualmode handset! Or maybe a slick wideband audio codec - but I wouldn’t hold my breath for that either since it would require transcoding which is an expense the service providers are actively mitigating today with TrFO and other efforts.
At the end of the day I just don’t see the value, at least for me.
The article did have one good quote, “There have been rumblings within the industry that IMS could serve as brick and mortar to repair the breached walled networks.” I think we have yet to see quite a few more courses of brick.
