IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

The FMC Forum of the Americas was held in Miami last week, drawing a small but diverse international crowd from countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Barbados, Trinidad, Dominican Republic, and of course United States.

This is the first conference I've been to that is dubbed an "interactive" conference, where the participants not only get a chance to ask questions of the panelists but sit at round tables and discuss questions to pose with other participants. This format provided an opportunity to meet almost everyone that attended the conference over the two day period, which helped to facilitate the regular networking opportunities at the provided breakfast, lunch, and cocktail events.

FMC means Fixed-Mobile Convergence, and describes a range of issues that revolve around how terrestrial and wireless services are marketed, blended, cross-leveled in terms of functionality, delivered in a common set of devices, and how the core networks providing the services become common. Sound like a lot? Yeah...

Among the many nuggets of information I learned at this conference, one that did not surprise me at all was a comment from Sandy Brown, Director of Wireless Integration at AT&T Business. "There is a huge gap between what customers think Fixed-Mobile Convergence is and what we think it is," said Sandy. He told a story of a customer visit where four of the people in the meeting, including a network guy and an IT guy, got into a heated argument about what the benefits of FMC were.

Let the customer education begin, I say! A number of my blog posts in the future will be aimed at educating our readers on what FMC is and what it means to the enterprise environment. I am also hoping to get educated myself during this process, and encourage customers to post comments or leave me an email.

Two of the presentations were delivered by MVNO's, or Mobile Virtual Network Operators. These are companies that sell mobile services, but do not have a mobile network of their own. Qwest has been doing this for years using Sprints mobile network as a way to have national coverage for their wireless customers while also conveniently avoiding the expense of building their own wireless infrastructure. The latest rage is for established content companies as well as emerging content provider wanna be's to put together a mobile service targeted at a special market segment, usually the segment with cash to burn (rich people, rich people's kids, or people that are willing to spend money they don't have to "stay connected." )

We heard from one such provider, Helio, who is targeting the 18-32 crowd with a phone and service that is all about sharing content with people in their network, just like myspace.com (in fact, every myspace profile has a prompt to add your myspace to your helio). Helio says that the content people share (like your friend that forwards you 5 jokes a day) says something about who that person is, and so they've built their entire service around allowing people to do that while on the go.

Another provider that launched recently with a more established brand and content is Mobile ESPN. Mobile ESPN is targeting the 29% of the population polled that considers themselves a serious sports enthusiast, and are expecting millions of people to subscribe to their service so that they can have instantenous score udpates, ESPN phones, and the most comprehensive access to sports information and media content of anyone, including an "answer guy" to resolve those pesky arguments that crop up in the bar.

Meanwhile, enter the MVNO and mobile operator that targets the enterprise with a service that offers the ultimate in features: corporate control, security, productivity (a la workflow management), and price.

But the catch is this: If you want your Mobile ESPN, you have to be an ESPN subscriber. You have to get the whole enchilada from ESPN -- phone, service, everything. That means that if you want it that bad, you'll have to get it in addition to your corporate provided phone that has all your mobile workflow features. Wait a minute, I need two phones? That's not convergence! This is the walled garden effect that the opponents of IMS warned us about (see this Alec Saunders post for some examples of the controversy).

It's enough to even make the industry experts confused. If a seasoned analyst firm such as Instat isn't clear that the connection between IMS-based applications and spending has as much to do with each other as the NSA and illegal wiretapping are supposed to have, what hope is there for the rest of us to figure it out?

IMS is an architecture. Just like the force, it can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. It can be used to create a walled-garden, or it can be used to create something more open. It can be used to enable the type of features that define Fixed-Mobile Convergence, or it could turn out to be too hard to deliver anything over the top of it. If IMS is the foundation of the house, you're still going to need a good architect to design a house that people will want to buy, and that's all IMS is. That's the connection to consumer or business spending.

Of course, the foundation might be broken leaving the house to fall like a house of cards, but that's a whole different issue, not to mention the topic for a future post.