FMC status: Who’s delivering what?

Fixed-mobile convergence options for businesses are increasing. But far more of them allow enterprises to install and manage their own solutions than provide service-based alternatives from mobile network operators.

For some businesses, that’s OK: “We’re certainly keeping tabs on carrier offerings, but one hesitation is you can’t be carrier-agnostic,” says Patrick Tisdale, CIO at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, a worldwide law firm based in San Francisco that is poised to trial the Agito Networks enterprise FMC system described in the last newsletter.

“We might want to change carriers. Or we might need to use different carriers in different parts of the world where some have better coverage than others,” Tisdale says. He perceives that a carrier-based FMC service, when it's available, would lock his company into exclusive mobile network use with that carrier.

“But the Wi-Fi element is prevalent; we’re hopeful that an Agito-like solution will allow us to use multiple carrier devices to move in and out of offices without issue,” he says.

While offerings are popping up for enterprise-based equipment to handle seamless handoff and potentially lower in-building cellular phone charges, the world’s mobile carriers currently delivering FMC – most notably, T-Mobile - are addressing the consumer market, not businesses. Mobile operators also face other distractions and tend to be more inclined to install in-building cellular systems in large customer locations to boost coverage of their own network signals than providing a dual Wi-Fi/cellular solution at this juncture.

Expect to see more coming from the carriers on this front, with the typical caveat that when carriers do something, they usually do it top-down, in a very big way. That takes time, internal buy-in and investment, and the carriers are already quite busy building out their 3G and 4G networks. They are also planning for the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auctions – which, by the way, will proceed with the open-access clause, it was decided by the FCC last week.