Merging phone calls
CUSTOMERS LOOKING to cut their phone bills have been promised a solution called fixed mobile convergence. Real-world experience of this service, however, has yet to live up to the promises.
Simply put, fixed mobile convergence is the ability to use your cellphone to make and receive calls wherever you are, but at the lowest cost possible.
In practical terms, what would happen is: You make a call on your cellphone while you are in the car, and this call is sent across the cellular network – at cellular call charges – once you reach your home, the call would be transferred across to your home broadband line using WIFi – at much lower call charges – without you noticing that it has happened.
This grand plan has been trumpeted by telcos all over the world for the past few years, but as Katja Ruud, analyst at US research house Gartner, points out, attempts to deliver this in the consumer space have met with little success.
She explains that in Europe there are a number of operators that have made a concerted effort to deliver a fixed mobile service. She picks out British Telecom (BT) and France Telecom – under its Orange brand – as examples of where different approaches have met with varying levels of success.
“BT was the first to market with a fixed mobile service, called BT Fusion, but it did this at the same time as it was trying to convince subscribers to ditch their dial-up Internet connections for broadband service,” she says.
“This created customer confusion and as a result the Fusion product has only been adopted by between 3% and 4% of the BT broadband subscriber base,” Ruud says.
In France, Orange focused on driving broadband adoption and services such as delivering television services over broadband before venturing into the fixed mobile space. As a result, its product, called Unique, has garnered more subscribers in a shorter time than BT Fusion.
Ruud points out that one of the issues facing fixed-line telecommunications operators is that cellular operators – while being a vital component of the service – are also competing in this space.
She explains that what they do is allow their subscribers to have access to lower call charges on the cell tower that covers their home. In the UK, BT – which sold its mobile arm – has partnered with Vodafone on BT Fusion, but at the same time Vodafone is offering its own pure cellular solution.
This is a problem that both Telkom and Neotel are likely to face when they try to introduce services that offer this to SA consumers. Telkom’s relationship with Vodacom is stressed, to say the least, and Neotel has publicly stated that it doesn’t want to be a mobile operator. This would mean they would both have to partner a cellular network that would probably be competing with its own offering. Telkom declined to comment on its plans for fixed mobile services, while Neotel – from its responses to questions posed by Finweek – seems to be focusing on the infrastructure enabling these kinds of service rather than on the services that would be delivered to customers.
As Ruud points out, fixed mobile service globally has yet to progress beyond simply offering better pricing to customers, to the creation of a set of services across multiple networks that would keep the user coming back for more.
In the corporate world, the demand for fixed mobile services is much higher. Rakash Mahajan, director of mobility at BT Global Services, points out that large corporates have spent a lot of money on services such as instant messaging or voice recording that can’t be used when the person is not in the office. They have also made moves to use technology such as voice over IP – which reduces the cost of telephone calls – but when people are using their cellphones, all these savings go out the window.
For companies that use these technologies to improve communication, the concept of a fixed mobile service that connects the mobile worker to all the corporate services, even when they are on the road, is very attractive.
He gives the example of a financial institution that is required to record all calls with clients. In this example it would be nigh impossible to conduct business over a cellphone because the call could not be recorded. With a level of integration between the mobile networks and the company’s recording system, it would be possible for the banker to transact from virtually anywhere.
“Considering that people tend to spend 47% of their time out of the office, extending the reach of office systems can have a big productivity gain,” he comments.
Finweek
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