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Converged services: Quietly does it

October 2, 2006
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(Total Telecom Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) One of the building blocks of fixed-mobile convergence is set for a short shelf life despite some low-key launches by several of Europes operators.

Telecom Italia was the latest to go to market with unlicensed mobile access (UMA) technology, but you could be forgiven for having missed the announcement. Last month it quietly launched its long-awaited offer under the brand name Unica.

Neither was there much fanfare when TeliaSonera launched its Home Free UMA service in Denmark, in August.

Telecom Italia finally got the go-ahead to launch Unica after a lengthy altercation with the regulator. Even now it is restricted to a six-month experimental service and allowed to sign up just 30,000 customers.

We have started the service, a spokesperson for Telecom Italia confirmed, but the regulator has prevented us from starting a natural service.

Telecom Italia remains tight-lipped on what will happen when the six months are up. The spokesperson insists the convergence is still going ahead, despite its recent change of strategy and personnel.

Customer demand for UMA services is far from proven. It took BT seven months to sign up 30,000 customers to its UMA service, Fusion. Homezone-style fixed-mobile substitution services from mobile operatorswhich essentially target the same demographichave seen significantly faster take-up. T-Mobile in Germany racked up 1 million customers to its @Home offer in half the time.



[Fusions] benefits sound uncannily like that of a mobile phone, said Phil Kendall, director, wireless network strategies at Strategy Analytics at the UMA Services and Technology Forum in London in September. He believes the key driver for UMA is to enable fixed-line operators to compete with aggressively-priced mobile bundles and homezone services.

Kerry Ritz, managing director of Vonage UK, agreed that operators, not consumers, are driving UMA. Theres not a demand from customers for FMC, he said.

Kendall predicts there will be 2 million UMA handset shipments this year, rising to 70 million by 2010. This will trail off as IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology picks up.

But some have a much bleaker prognosis. UMA has a small window of opportunity and that window is getting smaller, said Dean Bubley, principal analyst at Disruptive Analysis. I think it will fail outright.

Andrea Lagana, head of Telecom Italias home network and handset innovation unit, painted a different picture at the UMA Forum. A lot of people say UMA has a very limited timeframe[but] Im not completely sure it will be like that, he said. Once you introduce a technology, its not easy to switch it off.

TeliaSonera is considering how we can exploit the same services based on UMA, in other Nordic markets, said Peter Bredgaard, VP of business development. But he concedes it is unlikely to be a long-term service. I cannot for sure say we will run this five years from now. Probably not, he said.

UMA enables TeliaSonera to move away from the service provider business into our own network, said Bredgaard. You can get rid of your current PSTN subscription with this service, and customers can use any providers broadband connection with Home Free.

We are not using this as a tool to get more broadband, he insisted. The main driver is actually to get more market share of the mobile minutes.

To date, operators have concentrated on consumer UMA services. But last month BT revealed plans to launch a corporate version of Fusion in early 2007.

UMA is absolutely a viable enabler to enterprise mobility, said Talbot Hardy, CTO of Network Equipment Technologies. Enterprise UMA will live longer than expected.

Both Telecom Italia and TeliaSonera launched UMA with just one handset, the Samsung P200. Handsets are one of the most critical issues, said Lagana.

TeliaSonera has gone some way to tackling the problem by making Home Free compatible with GSM handsets. The service supports up to five mobile users per contract; just one is required to have a UMA handset.

Copyright 2006 Terrapinn Ltd


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