Making FMC more affordable

By Vivek Khuller, DiVitas Networks
www.divitas.typepad.com/blog

DiVitas agrees that FMC alone isn’t worth the effort, but a total Mobile UC solution is -- and FMC is just one component of Mobile UC. Following are our responses to issues raised about FMC in John Cox’s NetworkWorld article.

NWW POINT: “Wi-Fi/cellular convergence, to let your cell phone call over a WLAN or cellular network, is more complicated…”
DIVITAS COUNTERPOINT: If we can land a human on the moon in 1969, we can definitely make a voice call work on WiFi in 2008. What makes VoWiFi challenging is lack of adequate WiFi and cellular coverage – not the technology itself. Another item that is non-trivial is seamless roaming between WiFi and cellular networks. This is because there is no standard way to handoff calls between such networks. DiVitas has solved the latter problem in a very unique way and made it very easy for people to roam between these networks without dropping calls.

POINT: “It’s hard to find agreement on what the term FMC even means, or on how it relates to the even more confusing term of ‘unified communications.’”
COUNTERPOINT: Actually, FMC and how it integrates with UC is very easily explained – FMC is a component of Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) that pertains to the convergence of fixed (anything non-cellular including WiFi) and mobile (anything cellular) networks. Mobile UC pertains to providing access to various communications applications, such as phone, voice mail, IM, Email and contacts using a single mobile device. If you combine the two together, you get equal and seamless access to Mobile UC features over any fixed and mobile network.

POINT: “But FMC, however defined, comes at a cost …”
COUNTERPOINT: Of course, everything in life comes at a cost. You have to spend money on a car and gas if you wish to get from one place to another. The key question is if the cost is worth it. Yes, one has to spend money on Mobile UC. However, if it helps us save more money than we spend, e.g. by leveraging WiFi to reduce cellular bills, then it is worth it. Additionally, if it helps us become more productive by making us more accessible and responsive, and thereby allowing us to make more money, it is a technology that would be worth investing in.

POINT: “FMC is going to cost money and make the wireless network much more complicated. You have to become, in effect, a carrier. And you have to engineer your WLAN for a new metric: call capacity."
COUNTERPOINT: FMC would only marginally add to the cost of WLANs that companies are already deploying to provide wireless data access. Yes, the companies would have to spend a little extra to engineer their networks for “call capacity.” However, the incremental investment is not exorbitant, and it definitely would not make companies into carriers.

POINT: “… mobile carriers generally are reluctant to do anything that drains revenue from cellular minutes, so don't look for them to push FMC down your throat …”
COUNTERPOINT: It is a misconception to think there is some dependency on carriers for deploying a Mobile UC solution. There is none, and carriers’ lack of activity in this space has no negative effect on solutions that are available today. If anything, carriers benefit from Mobile UC deployments among enterprises because it means they gain increased handset adoption within organizations and the data plans that go with them. It’s a much coveted opportunity to penetrate business users.

POINT: "To scale this up [to the enterprise], you have to create a 'PBX in the sky' and surround it with policies that allow the employee to use the handset for personal and business tasks while automatically and reliably separating the charges accordingly … "
COUNTERPOINT: Nope. There is no such need to create a “PBX in the sky”. Simply use the standard corporate PBX. The flexibility of the Mobile UC client allows mobile users to selectively choose the corporate or personal cellular number on an ad hoc basis, keeping the billing of the two numbers completely separate.