Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC)

Following a long period of development, fixed mobile convergence (FMC) appears ready to arrive in the froms of real carrier services for enterprises.The concept of FMC-the ability to access multimedia application from a variety of end user device while roaming across a range of fixed line and mobile networks-has broad appeal.Enterprise see FMC as a way to improve employee efficiency which may also help reduce telecom costs.Carrier look to help them survive and grow in a world where profits from providing mere connectivity and transport for voice and data rapidly dwindling.

Industry analysts are projecting aggresive uptake of FMC services:global sales of dual mode mobile phones are expected to exceed 100 million units by 2010 (per ABI research).FMC revenues may reach US80 billion worldwide by 2009 (per pyramid research)

FMC promises to provide carriers and their partners with a range of new applications and srevices they can deliver to enterprises to drive revenue, profits and customer retention.The first managed services to offer true convergence will allow enterprises users to roam between cellular networks and voice enabled wireless LANs (WLANs),using dual mode handset equipped with 3G and Wi-Fi radios.Carriers considering their own FMC solutions can learn some important lessons from the innovative carriers who brought these services to market in 2006,such as the new functioanllity that WLANs deliver,making mobile voice practical within the enterprises campus

As with all fundamentally transformative processes,the FMC revolution-from our current collection of disjointed fixed and mobile carrier and enterprise network,toward seamlessly interoperating,converged multimedia applicaiton delivery platform-will take place in a series of incremental steps

Carriers and enterprises that anticipate the critical technology inflection points that accompany each major phase in the evolution toward FMC will be able to make smarter decisions on near-term network infrastructure investments


The Role of WLANs in FMC

One of the critical inflection points in the path to FMC is the advent of WLAN infrastructure capable of supporting mobile voice with sophisticated roaming capabilities.Early carrier rollouts of managed FMC services have identified certain limitations inherent in aging WLAN architectures that use independent access points ( so called "fat APs") or a centralized WLAN gateway (the WLAN switch with thin APs approach)

The WLAN component of managed FMC services will have to implement a third - generation architecture - one that leverages discrete,distributed handling of WLAN transport,control and management functions - in order to deliver the following critical features:

1. Definition and enforcement of very granular WLAN quality of service policies,tunable to broad range of application (notable voice and video),end device capabilities and other characteristic

2. A combination of centralized control and access point intellegence to optimize perfomance along the data path to ensure scalability and consistent perfomance.

3. Seamless roaming (handover) between WLAN access points on the same LAN segment and between WLAN access points on different IP subnets

4. Management tools to help carriers centrally monitor,troubleshoot, and maintain WLAN equioment across an FMC customer base that may extend to thousand of locations

5. Features to support an eventual migration to IP multimedia system, including session initiantion protocl (SIP) based VoIP signaling and other SIP-enabled applications and services

6. Access point features to automatically enable to connection of the broadest possible range of end user device and radio types without the need for any end user configuration work

7. The ablitiy to add WLAN capacity in cost effective increments and planning tools that help carriers anticipate and pre emptively address problems with enterprise WLAN congestion,radio frequency (RF) coverage and infrastructure resilency

8. Thigh integration and interoperation with the wired LAN and its bandwidth management,netwrok security and authentication/authorization/accounting (AAA) infrastructure

Carriers considering their first FMC offerings can benefit greatly from the experiences of FMC pioneers and their customers.Talking to vendor reference customers will provide useful insight into how their WLAN infrastructure choice helped or impeded the rollout of FMC services.
At a minimum,carriers should begin to more closely examine the implications of FMC on WLANs as they consider potential vendor alliances.Identifying a WLA solution that can meet FMC's requirement - for multimedia support,quality of service (QoS), perfomance, scalability, managemeability and security - may help carriers to avoid some potentially costly mistakes.