FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence) is the Kevin Pietersen of the telecommunications industry: so much promise, some amazing performances but engendering so many conflicting opinions as to leave cricket lovers frustrated up to now: you’ve got the talent, Kevin, for goodness sake settle down and use it properly!
FMC is the coming together of wired and wireless technologies and services as a integrated whole. It is a foundation on which to deliver workable, day-to-day communications in which the clever stuff is, hopefully, largely transparent to the user. It offers striking advantages both for the organisations who can deliver it and the organisations who enjoy it.
Gone will be some of the physical barriers currently preventing service providers from reaching potential customers with their full panoply of services. Wired service providers can untie themselves from a purely landline network. Wireless operators can improve the overall integrity of their networks and offer a greater range of services to their mobile subscribers.
Accessibility enhancing productivity
For end users, FMC aims to facilitate and extend today’s business communications, removing the barriers to smooth, trouble-free contact and enabling timely responses to customers and colleagues alike. It targets an organisation’s people moving within and outside its locations, offering the prospect of greater productivity through time saving and simplicity, with services such as ubiquitous one-number reach and, when the person choose to be unavailable, single-number voicemail.
Customer can get through first time; the individual can choose to be contactable by co-workers while on the move and away from the office. It is a vision of productivity that has captured the imagination in the past few years – fuelled both by economic necessity and the allure of competitive advantage. In reality, FMC remains in its early stages of fulfilment, but while the waters look largely calm, there is turmoil and excitement beneath the surface.
The debate is now when and how
Solutions already exist to meet the mobile device needs of different types of mobile workforce, their different jobs and different working environments, from laptops and PDAs with softphones to smartphones and ruggedised computers. Much can be done by an organisation itself to be FMC-ready, depending on its priorities and expertise, while many service providers and integrators have already cut their FMC teeth and can offer leading- rather than bleeding-edge FMC solutions.
Research consistently suggests that the fixed-mobile boundaries will largely be down by the time Tom Daley jumps off his high board in the 2012 Olympics, thanks to universal migration to all-IP networks, layered networks and some excellent work by the ITU Next Generation Networks standards setters. Today’s debate is not whether it will happen, but how equipment and service providers can meet the needs of the various markets – mainly through highly flexible core networks that can support all manner of access-aware devices and access-neutral networking.
FMC is at a crucial formative stage, as IP networks are built out from the enterprise, with Ethernet and wireless LAN technologies; incumbent and new service providers look to personalise their services through cellular and WiMAX networks and manufacturers continually improve the processing and display capabilities of their devices.
In the communications “wars”, for FMC – to coin a phrase – it is now, the end of the beginning.
Highlighted Seminar at IP Expo: FMC – Myths & Reality (ShoreTel).
