BT Group Plc launched a consumer FMC offering in the UK in June last year. The BT Fusion services uses Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology to tunnel GSM traffic, via a Bluetooth connection, over a DSL link in the subscriber’s home and charges for it at fixed-line rates. Meanwhile traffic when the person is out and about goes over a regular mobile network, for which reason BT is an MVNO on Vodafone UK.
At the beginning of this year BT Spain announced intentions to launch a Fusion service in that country for the SMB market, adding that it would look at all the country’s mobile operators as potential partners for an MVNO deal. And in February Marc Patterson, VP and general manager of mobile data services at BTGS’s US arm, BT Infonet, said the company was considering how it would address the enterprise mobility challenge in North America, admitting even WiMAX as a possible alternative.
However, Rakesh Mahajan, director of mobility at the UK incumbent’s business services arm, said its plans for the Corporate Fusion service, as it is called, will not entail any MVNO deals. A company’s employees will be able to use their regular SIM cards, whether from their personal accounts or a corporate mobile provider, and will slot them into special dual-mode handsets from BT to take part in the FMC service, he explained.
The consumer Fusion service launched with Motorola handsets fitted with a special UMA client, but the Corporate version won’t use UMA. Instead, the dual-mode phones will have a SIP client to enable VoWLAN when the employee is on corporate premises, the traffic reverting to the normal mobile network when off-site.
There will be two flavours of Corporate Fusion, Mahajan went on, the decision as to which a customer should take being based on the nature of their network. A large bank with branches all over a country will want the intelligence of an FMC system resident in the core of the network, so for them we’ll offer a hosted flavour on a platform Alcatel is developing for us, he began. Companies with a number of major hubs, on the other hand, will prefer a distributed architecture, with IP PBXes at each site to deliver FMC.
He was loath to provide the name of the BT’s IP PBX vendor of choice, not least because it is a major partner both of Cisco with its CallManager and, in other contexts, of Nortel, who recently teamed with Microsoft on unified comms, and Microsoft is yet another significant partner for the UK carrier. We’re currently working with one but are looking at expanding it to multiple vendors, depending on their roadmaps, he revealed.
There will be differences between the on- and off-premises FMC services, Mahajan acknowledged. With the network-based solution, where all the intelligence is centralized, you’ll be getting full presence, context [i.e. ‘available’, ‘on a call’, ‘can’t talk now’, etc.] and so on, whereas if it’s IP PBX-based, there’ll be no context.
Which leaves the question of how BT will address the question of CDMA. It is not actually the case that there are no SIM cards for CDMA: for the newer geographies to which it took CDMA, Qualcomm received requests for the same kind of card-based subscriber identity that SIM enables for GSM, so it came up with the Re-Usable Identification Module (RUIM), the first operator to implement the technology being China Unicom.
However, RUIM cards have not been the norm in the States (there Sprint is apparently starting to dabble with the technology). Mahajan, who is based in the UK, said he has timetabled meetings with his team in the US around the end of this month to hammer out a strategy for this, because obviously, if BT Infonet picks up a corporate customer which has Verizon Wireless as its mobile provider, or even if it has a customer with individual employees on that network, it will need to have something to slot into its Corporate Fusion handsets.
