FMC or Wireless Substitution?

In the coming war between mobile substitution and mobile-fixed integration approaches to unifying communications, it was inevitable that the "green" argument would appear as a weapon. OnRelay argues IP desk phones sold in 2008 alone will create 47 million kilograms of waste. Calling desk phones increasingly redundant, OnRelay argues the better path is simply to reuse mobiles as office handsets, substituting mobile for landline handsets rather than integrating the two calling methods.

"We do business in an increasingly mobile environment," says Marie Wold, OnRelay president. "Fifty to 70 percent of enterprise voice minutes are already mobile."

Her conclusion? "Landline office phones are simply a waste." In fact, her argument is in some ways similar to the argument proponents of hosted services and cloud computing take: that the public and private IP networks now are robust enough and easy enough to use that remote provisioning makes more sense.

In this case, using mobile networks in place of in-building wiring is seen as a better way to provide desktop phone equipment, at the same time avoiding the expense of new IP phones and upgrades to corporate networks to handle voice.

"An enterprise deployment of 10,000 IP extensions includes a large hidden cost of LAN switches, routers, cabling and power supplies required to support the IP voice traffic," says Wold. "Of the staggering $15.8 million total cost of the IP telephony deployment, 80 percent is related to the desk phones and corresponding LAN upgrades."

Wold argues that most, if not all, employees can manage their office communications equally well or better with just their mobiles.

Which brings up an interesting question: to what extent are fixed-mobile convergence" projects less about "converging" and more about "diverging." In other words, though FMC can be pitched as a "convergence" of wireless and wireline networks, by allowing wireline access to substitute for mobile network access, in practice such "convergence" really leads to wireless substitution.

One can argue that the lower calling costs possible when a mobile handset is able to send and receive messages using a wireline-attached base station of some sort truly is a form of convergence. One might argue it is another form of substitution. The attempt is to stimulate use of mobile minutes from indoor locations, provide better quality when doing so, and decrease network-related operating and capital costs. All of those objectives are praiseworthy, but are not actually "convergence" moves. They are about mobile substitution.

Even when a "fixed line only" operator begins deploying mobile handsets to compete with mobile service providers, that s less a case of "convergence" and more a case of trying to grab some mobile market share while ensuring a continued viable role for the terrestrial broadband network.

"Fixed mobile convergence" has been touted as a way to create new services that unify experiences between wireline and wireless domains. But it seems more likely that divergence is the more likely result, so long as the focus is on calling prices and access networks.

Matters arguably are different in an enterprise scenario, where the seamless availability of applications on desk and mobile handsets, rather than calling cost or end point choices, would seem to be the driver. But as OnRelay argues, one has to integrate desk phones and mobiles only if one insists on using both types of devices on a wide scale. If one goes with a wireless tail, there isn't much need for "convergence."

FMC might be one of those significant detours the global telecom industry takes now and then, in a well-intentioned effort to create next-generation services. At some level, it makes sense to unify services across end user devices. But that makes most sense when assumes the existence of multiple classes of highly-deployed end points.

Over the longer term, it probably will happen that FMC winds up being less important as a way of "integrating desk phones and mobiles," and more important as it refers to making Web-based and server-based applications available on mobile devices. In the future, it might be more important to unify application access on all sorts of mobile and fixed "Web capable" devices than to unify mobile and fixed voice appliances.