The recent announcement by T-Mobile and Meru Networks that UMA is supported by both came as no surprise. I’m a big fan of UMA, which continues to progress in the carrier-centric convergence world, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work across essentially every WLAN and WWAN. IMS is certainly overkill for this capability alone, and, while I continue to believe that enterprise-centric, equipment-based convergence solutions will eventually predominate, UMA’s client-side functionality offers an interesting possibility: suppose the mobile-device industry standardized on UMA, and included the client in every mobile device? Having competing clients is a big problem, especially on handsets and similar very-mobile platforms, because configurations need to be limited in practice and mobile-device-management systems and procedures are still evolving. Having a single, standard client makes a lot of sense.
Of course, the client would need to be extensible and skinable, and the politics here are certainly going to be thick. But the sooner we have standard for client-side functionality, the sooner more users will be benefiting from converged voice and data systems, as well as unified communications in general.
Speaking of which – I published a White Paper on the general subject of unified communications in healthcare with Cisco a few months ago. I think it’s important to begin thinking of convergence and unified communications together, creating an extensible set of services that run across as many networks and devices as possible. This also plays well with my emphasis on thin clients, moving more function into the network and eventually doing away with the increasingly-counterproductive notion of a “personal computer”.
