Everybody knows that revolutionary transitions of every-day-use technologies never take place, not only because you can’t make a whole people mass to change the way of thinking, but also because technology evolves in a step-by-step way. So, to complement my past post, today I’ll approach a way how the cell-phone network could migrate in a pace transition, to VoWiFi/VoWiMAX.
This transition has a name and it’s FMC (Fixed-mobile convergence). Today, i got to read about a start-up, www.divitas.com, that has an offer of this type:
“DiVitas makes enterprise-relevant communications networks transparently available to users through a single wireless handset and Fixed -Mobile Convergence (FMC) functionality that includes multi-network roaming, seamless handoff, and secure remote access.”
They are not the only ones innovating in these matters, British Telecom with the “Bluephone project” introduced this approach and so are doing most of the Telecoms, that as a response to the decaying long-distance revenues entered into the cell phone business. Now they are trying to make their network Wireless/Fixed to appear as one.
So… you pay high cell-phone tariffs, but as soon as you reach a WiFi hotspot, your handheld device switches to fixed network and charges you fixed-phone tariffs. The high work here is the approach of the handoff, how can you still continue your conversation even if you changed to a totally different network. In fact, this issue has been resolved but partially, because if it’s true that the handoff is done, there are still a lot of handoff-blocking (Calls lost because of the change), actually lots of research centers are working in order to solve this issue.
The first step has been done, now the trend is that WiFi network coverage increase and progresively you’ll start to use more the WiFi network than the Cell-phone one.
Wait a minute… so where would be the VoIP actual players in this scenario?? As soon as the UMTS internet connection decrease in price, the handhelds would be connecting to – just to say a name – Skype, this way making transparent to the user the fact that they are connected to the internet through UMTS, WiFi or WiMAX, always seeing the same service. Cool huh?