Reuters ran a story today from the FMC World Congress in Amsterdam.
The article cites very weak consumer uptake leading to the cancellation of T-Mobile’s T-One service in Germany, and weak uptake also at Neuf Cegetel. It seems strangely unbalanced, since it doesn’t mention T-Mobile’s imminent national rollout of FMC in the USA, the BT/Vodafone Fusion service and the FT/Orange Unik service. There are several other UMA deployments that would have made the outlook seem less gloomy.
The T-Mobile service was survived in Germany by T-Com’s similar service, Telekom-Vorteil, a “fixed/Wi-Fi” service that routes wireline calls over Wi-Fi, so you can use a Wi-Fi phone or the Wi-Fi of your dual mode phone to pick up calls on your home number when you are at home. This is not UMA based, and drops the call when you move out of Wi-Fi range. People like it.
Voice on the Internet
“it doesn’t mention (…) the BT/Vodafone Fusion service and the FT/Orange Unik service. There are several other UMA deployments that would have made the outlook seem less gloomy”
Mmm, we must not have the same sources as I constantly read and hear that both these services are not seeing any take up despite the massive marketing blitz. I would be interested to see real numbers that demonstrate these services are successful.
I otherwise agree with Reuters, FMC is still too complex and therefore way off mass market adoption.
FMC is a tough sell for consumers the way it is being presented currently. There are two possible selling propositions: it could be cheaper than pure cellular, or it could give better coverage. Better coverage would appeal only to people who are in bad coverage areas, and they can always try another carrier, so we are left with cheaper, which doesn’t appeal to the carriers.
FMC has a better chance being sold to businesses initially, since it has several additional attractions, like PBX features anywhere in the world.
Still, in the USA T-Mobile had positive enough results from the Seattle trial to roll it out nationally.