I Say FMC, You Say VCC

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Of course, the term “FMC” itself has differing personas.

“FMC has several different connotations with different people,” says Frank Salm, Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) is the logical complement to Unified Communications (News - Alert) (UC), allowing you to maintain a phone call (or video call or multimedia ‘event’) as you continuously move about the communications landscape, which will ultimately involve roaming from cellular to WiFi (News - Alert) to WiMAX to 2.5G to 3G to 4G and so on. The key concept making FMC possible is Voice Call Continuity (VCC), a term which started out years ago referring merely to the ability for a mobile phone conversation to continue (“seamless in-call handoff”) when a circuit-switched call reroutes to use a new base station as a mobile phone moves between coverage areas. The VCC focus then became how to move between circuit-switched and IMS (packet-switched) calls and now,
in particular, the challenge of handing over a call between cellular and a wireless LAN.Vice President of Marketing at Sylantro (www.sylantro.com). “Some view the feature of seamless mobility and seamless handover between fixed and wireless as being ‘FMC’. Others, however, consider FMC the ability to actually service both wireless and fixed properties off of a single platform, of which IMS is all about.”

“At Sylantro, we service both of these worlds, having offerings that fit either one,” says Salm. “In the IMS world we have customers deploying VCC vendor equipment out there and we have some interop that’s taking place and a customer who’s deploying a third-party VCC product. So, we’ve done extensive interoperability testing with that product to ensure that, as an application server, we can seamlessly interoperate with them.”

“Then, of course, we have our own internal solutions which are used with some of the handset client vendors out there,” says Salm. “Swisscom is a model customer from a fixed-mobile perspective. We started with Swisscom in the fixed space with residential; they had a service that was based on the Sylantro platform. They then took the same platform and hosted IP Centrex off of it. Now, this is all NGN [Next Gen-Network] technology we’re talking about. Sylantro is the registrar; we do all of the routing to a peering softswitch, and so on. Swisscom was one of the first operators to really embrace IMS, and it was very natural for them to move into that space.”

Salm elaborates: “From a Sylantro perspective, we provide a pure application server and we have Ericsson (News - Alert) offering the IMS core, which is indeed servicing fixed and mobile systems simultaneously. Sylantro has always had products service the mobile world from a terminating perspective, so calls come in and we can route them over to mobile. We’ve had a very successful product in that space for quite some time, because it’s not just basic call forwarding to your cell phone; it’s the ability to route calls to a cell phone and pull the call back and then drop it into a common voice mailbox.”

“But as we move to a company that owns both mobile and fixed properties, things get very interesting,” says Salm, “because now they can indeed force traffic from both fixed and mobile into a common application server and offer the subscriber a common phone number and a common service that operates across both properties. Most carriers that own both properties have two separate organizations and separate regulatory issues, so in the case of Swisscom, it is starting off by offering one service in the fixed space and another service in the mobile space; later on they will install a converged service offered to users on both sides. Fortunately, our application server does not differentiate between the two. And of course the power of IMS is the ability to tailor those offerings to one domain or the other, or even both simultaneously.”

IMS or UMA?
FMC is often seen as the logical extrapolation of IMS [ IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) ] which promises a single service architecture for wireless and wireline networks. But a handoff feature resembling VCC can also be delivered by IMS’ more diminutive rival, UMA [Unified Mobile Access].

As Graham Ellis, Senior Marketing Manager at Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Networks (www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com) says, “FMC is moving ahead slowly. There’s fair amount of inertia, particularly in the North American markets. Europe is a little ahead of the U.S. — they’re getting their feet wet and are trying things out. We have seen an entity such as T-Mobile (News - Alert) launch their HotSpot@Home in Washington state, a FMC play based on UMA service that started in Seattle, which is similar to what’s happening in Europe. UMA is a rival to IMS and it’s a solution that’s available today.”

Seattle had perhaps the first serious deployment of UMA in the U.S.; Europe has seen BTFusion, a joint venture of British Telecom and Vodafone, which has been operating in a UMA environment for 18 months or so.

“VCC is a term used by the wireless community,” says Ellis. “It refers to the core FMC ability to start a call on a local network using a dual-band phone and then, depending on your location, move across to a wide area network; i.e., licensed mobile spectrum. Those features are out there but the uptake is that they’re attached to IMS, which is still a bit of a waiting game for most of the large players right now. Everybody is still justifying the business case around IMS in general. So, in terms of FMC products getting out to the marketplace, it’s unfortunately tied to that. Still, the technology barriers have been lowered.”

“There are some pockets of activity,” says Ellis. “Some of the cable operators, for example, are dabbling with IMS trials and looking at things such as VCC. There are also some business applications for mobile IP Centrex and things like that, but we’re largely still playing a waiting game, because operators are still pondering the business case for FMC and IMS. Also, both suppliers and operators in our industry need to help educate consumers as to what FMC is about and what’s the benefit to them. So there’s two barriers, really, which is why things are moving slowly. But there is a will and an intent in the operator community to move toward FMC since everybody sees benefits there.”

“Here at Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens, we can provide technology solutions which are ‘well-baked’ and they’re already deployed in various places worldwide,” says Ellis. “Just recently we announced our relationship with Georgia Tech in Atlanta and the IMS Applications Competition that we conducted with them. Not only did we invest about $5 million in a state-or-the-art communications facility that hosts a test bed for IMS products, but we also sponsored the development competition. Some very interesting applications are being developed by the student body, such as around social networking, asset management, and things like automatically changing your ringtone to vibrate when you walk into a meeting.”

Push-To-Everything
Mobile Tornado (News - Alert) (www.mobiletornado.com) has concentrated its efforts on mobile convergence with instant communication solutions based on their patented Push-To-Talk (PTT) IPRS™ (IP Radio Service) technology that includes handset-agnostic client software integration and interoperability between and among PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, ruggedized handsets, fixed lines and multiple operating systems.

Mobile Tornado’s David Parry, Vice President of Global Sales, says, “We’re a software technology business focusing on IP multimedia instant communications. Our first application in this area was PTT. We’ve developed a portfolio along the path of IMS, which runs on a single server. We can layer applications on that, starting with PTT, and going up to email and any form of content you like, up into the world of instant messaging, and culminating in Push-To-Video [PTV]. We’ve partnered with Nortel (News - Alert) on the PTV, which occurs essentially in real-time, with latency times of sub-milliseconds, which makes it faster than Sprint Nextel.”

“So we have a layering of applications running on top of a single server proposition that’s pre-IMS in nature, which our customers like because if they decide to go adopt an IMS architecture, then by buying our applications they’ll already be integrated with IMS — or not, as the they desire,” says Parry. “For the higher-end products, they’ll obviously need faster networks.”

“We also offer data applications can be deployed on any network,” says Parry, “so it doesn’t matter whether they’re working with CDMA or GSM networks. Our technology is handset-agnostic because our applications are server-based and not handset-based. We can port our client onto any handset as long as it is PTT-enabled, whether it’s Symbian (News - Alert) or whatever platform. We also have a PC client and we’re fully interoperable between mobile-to-mobile, mobile-to-PC, PC-to-mobile, one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many, since there’s no real limit to how many people can be on at any one time. Our latest development is to run our technology on fixed-line VoIP telephones.”

“We now have two routes to market: One is directly to the operators — in partnership with infrastructure vendors — for the consumer space, and the other is into the enterprise space, together with operators and systems integrators,” says Parry. “In both cases we’re talking about FMC, because our app allows the operator to run services across any handset and across the PC.”

Making the (Infrastructure) World Safe for FMC
Roy Sun, Director of Product Marketing and Product Management for Core Network Solutions at Huawei (News - Alert) Technologies (www.huawei.com), says, “Huawei believes that FMC will be very important for the telco industry in the near future. Huawei has been strong in VoIP technologies. We have been ranked Number 1 in softswitch and media gateway deployments worldwide. Right now we offer a whole IP-based IMS solution. In December 2006, Huawei launched its IMS 3.0 solution which targets both wireline and wireless carriers globally. The major service capability provided by our IMS 3.0 solution is indeed for FMC. Based on communication with our customers worldwide, we believe that FMC will be very important to them, be they wireline or wireless carriers.”

“We believe that it’s important for a carrier to have an open-mind when considering the huge transformation of the network both in terms of technology and business models when moving to IMS and FMC,” says Sun. “The success for IMS and FMC will depend on several key criteria: First, a ‘loose evolution’ capability will be important for both carriers and vendors to transform current networks to become IMS/FMC-ready at a comfortable pace. Second, it’s equally important for the carrier and the vendor to think about how to rebuild their business model. IMS or FMC is challenged by carriers and vendors because the transformation of the technology they bring about is so significant and profound that the old business models used by carriers can no longer work. Both wireless and wireline carriers must think about what is their strategy and position; on the other hand, there’s a similar challenge for the telco equipment vendor, such as Huawei. That is why we have focused on the openness of the value chain and partnerships with the industrial players for the IMS and FMC solution. We have over 50 partners working closely with us to provide a total solution for our customers.”

Recently, Synchronoss Technologies (News - Alert) (www.synchronoss.com) held the world’s first FMC Industry Retreat in Napa, California, a two-day event with leading communication service providers and industry thought leaders in attendance, representing Accel Partners, Advanced Newhouse, CBS- Market Watch, Covad, Cox Communications, Earthlink, IDC, Level3, Pac-West, Qwest, Sprint, Telephia, Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable, and Vonage. They all were there to discuss the state of FMC and to identify the key factors enabling providers to succeed. Their findings are as follows:

• While communications service providers are rapidly transitioning from offering individual siloed services
  such as basic voice, video, and data to marketing and delivering bundled offerings (e.g. triple and quad play offerings), they must   fully integrate the delivery, activation, fulfillment and invoicing for such offerings to realize their full business potential.

• Service providers will need to embrace symbiotic relationships with OEMs, and digital content providers including Web 2.0   applications, in order to deliver market-driven solutions and a superb customer experience.

• The emergence of a “universal activation orchestration and customer care” operation will be needed to address issues and   inquiries related to the different components of FMC solutions.

Synchronoss itself has figured how to speed up procedures normally followed by FMC providers. Synchronoss recently announced ConvergenceNow™, its next-gen platform for communications service providers that accelerates “order-to-cash processes” for complex service bundles including voice, video, wireless, high speed Internet access, applications and content. This new development joins Synchronoss’ existing ActivationNow® platform to automate and simplify electronic service creation and management of advanced wireline, wireless and IP services across existing networks.

Omar Tellez, Executive Vice President of Marketing for Synchronoss, says, “It’s pretty well established that communications service providers have clearly seen that there’s a significant revenue benefit in bundling services. From a BSS and OSS standpoint, what has to happen in order to activate, provision and manage the orders for double, triple and quad-plays is not trivial. As you can imagine, many of these communications service providers have established ‘silos’ of communications services for the past 10 or more years. Orchestrating the activation of an individual in each one of these services and then getting back to the end consumer with a joint value proposition, is not a minor matter. At a high level, our convergence value proposition is about optimizing the consumer experience of these bundles.”