VOIP, Wireless & FMC: What Happens When Technology Matures?VOIP, Wireless & FMC: What Happens When Technology Matures?

The answer to this article’s title question will depend on the technology. For example, one can argue that VoIP has matured although “in many cases overall year-over-year growth [in enterprises] was modest” — a quote from “The State of North American Business Customer Adoption of IPT and VOIP” posted by Lisa Pierce on April 1. Thus, it’s mature but not widely implemented in enterprises. However, in the consumer sector, VoIP is a technology that is increasingly taken for granted--witness the success of Skype.

Flashback: The first feature article I wrote explained the difference between DECT and GSM. At the time I had to explain that DECT was a local area technology while GSM was wide area--and of course in time the “area” became the world. The article also covered the “architecture” of a GSM network. We don’t write or think about the technology that underpins the “anywhere, anytime” paradigm anymore, but the ability to find the party you are calling in seconds, when he/she can be on another network on the other side of the world is awesome. In the case of cellular, it's based on an intelligent network, but who cares? Cellular telephony works, so we simply take it for granted. That’s what happens when technologies mature; however, good technology need not stand still.

GSM has advanced in terms of functionality: multimedia, cameras and video recording have been added — data rates are good enough for PC apps and they’re getting better. VoIP has also moved on, and is now looking at its next generation, whether that’s called Unified Communications, Communications Enabled Business Processes, VoIP 2.0, or some other term. Whatever it’s called, the name suggests making voice an integral and seamless part of mainstream business applications.

Within this broader context, VoIP over Wi-Fi is an interesting development, since it could provide a much cheaper alternative to cellular telephony. Could has been italicized because the FMC jury hasn’t delivered its verdict. For example, when a consumer has a mobile phone, why do they need a FMC “solution” in the home? With virtually unlimited “night and weekend” rates, they already have cheap calling.

Of course, mobile network operators aren’t offering these kinds of deals because they’ve morphed into a philanthropic institution. They’re doing it because VoIP represents a formidable challenge to their business model, and they have seen the way packet-switched technology has decimated the revenue stream of fixed line operators. The competitive response is to drop tariffs and offer special deals, so right now VoIP and cellular telephony would appear to be going head to head, but mobile network operators are migrating their network cores to IP, which means that a marriage is pending. More on this in a moment.

The short-term network driver is the cellular carriers’ need to lower operating costs, which can be achieved by migrating the circuit-switched core network to IP. That is the only way that the carrier industry can realize the enormous potential of emerging markets such as China and India. The longer-term goal is “anywhere, anytime” access to applications and services over any broadband access network, i.e. wireline, wireless (Wi-Fi and WiMAX) and cellular (2G through to LTE [Long Term Evolution]). You can see this development as a superset of FMC—or, put another way, today’s FMC solutions represent a small but significant step towards a fully unified environment that we’ll access via multimodal, mobile devices. Between now and 2010, I expect the term FMC to disappear.

The transition to all-IP network cores is normally associated with the introduction of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). This is a somewhat contentious subject and even now the number of commercial deployments is low and IMS terminals are not, as yet, fully aligned. IMS was designed to simplify the network architecture and facilitate access to multimedia and voice applications across wireless and wireline terminals. It’s not positioned as an FMC solution, but the functionality is the same. "Commercial" was italicized above because while vendors have sold lots of systems, probably more than 200, service rollouts are thin on the ground because a number of issues have to be resolved. However, given the size of the investments and the momentum it’s only a matter of time.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A TECHNOLOGY IS MADE TO WORK?

The bold (maybe foolish) prediction that the term FMC will disappear is based on the fact that the business case for FMC in enterprises is predicated on the high cost of cell-to-cell calls made inside the same building. One solution, the first to be marketed, entailed engineering the Wireless LAN for voice and investing in dual-mode (Wi-Fi and cellular) phones. However, WLANs are really a set of wireless extensions to the LAN, so there were handover latency issues. Moreover, WLANs were designed for data, so they don’t do voice particularly well unless traffic streaming is employed, and this is not supported in most deployments. This means that service quality is uncertain, particularly when cells become congested. In addition, the whole exercise is tricky and expensive. One can argue that before VoIP, the situation was the same for the Internet, i.e. the network was designed for data, not voice —but in this case the benefits went much further than free/cheap telephony.

There is a valid case to be made for dual-mode FMC in the small-medium enterprise (SME) space, since office areas are much smaller and can therefore be covered with a few access points. And femtocells, which are small cellular base stations, are attractive, particularly in areas where access to a cellular network is limited or not available. They connect to the service provider’s network via DSL or cable. A key benefit of this solution is the ability to work with legacy 2G devices.

There are alternative solutions. Alan Quayle, a consultant who writes an excellent WebLog, suggests:

The mobile Centrex/hosted PBX solution depends, of course, on the ability of service providers to provide meaningful solutions. Unfortunately, they only respond when threatened, and vendors have to spell out the marketing opportunity. This solution is not a forced marriage of disparate technologies, but it has to go beyond voice and enable access to mainstream business applications and services. This is something that DiVitas does particularly well. In this case it’s the CPE-centric, handset-centric dual-mode approach.

YOUR PREFERRED COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE?

It’s a cell phone. It has to be. That’s the device you carry most of the time, and the new smartphones are handheld PCs that perform light data tasks. Moreover, Apple has ignited a fire under the device manufacturers: a phone doesn’t have to look like a phone and it can have an interface that’s fun to use. Regular smartphones and iPhones do email, SMS, and multimedia. They have (or will have) open interfaces that enable access to a plethora of personal and presence-driven services. In other words, the role of cell phones as the preferred communications device is going to increase in future. And once again, the technology — whether the air interface is circuit- or packet-switched — is of no interest to the market. Subscribers simply want to access those upcoming services from any location using the best available connection. And they want seamless transitions.

Right now we tend to see seamless transitions in FMC terms, i.e. cellular to and from Wi-Fi, but a smart network would include broadband wireline access. For example, you might be watching a movie on your mobile and when you enter your home, the best available connection would be over DSL. And the best device would be a PC or a TV. It should be doable because the new mobiles are smart devices, so it would be possible for them to work in client-server mode with a really smart network, i.e. a network that performs as if it were a gigantic server. That may sound like blue-sky thinking, but bear with me.

INTELLIGENT NETWORKS AND SMART CONNECTIVITY

Recall two earlier statements. One, the awesome intelligent network technology that underpins cellular telephony. And two, the intrinsic ability of all-IP network cores to minimize operating costs and thereby enable profitable services to be marketed in the emerging markets, where the average revenue will be a few dollars a month. If this goal can be realized, then analysts and vendors such as Nokia Siemens Networks estimate that another 1 billion users will employ a cellular device for multimedia communications and access to the Internet by 2015.

The new all-IP networks will also have a very flat architecture along the lines of the Figure below. In this example, the architecture broadly divides into a connectivity area (owned by the operator) and an application space. Access to the apps is enabled over fixed broadband, wireless broadband and cellular broadband. The two domains — the application space and the connectivity area —are linked via session control and identity management. Session control will be an extension of that currently provided by IMS.

FIGURE The Emerging Architecture

The connectivity area comprises the multi-access network as well as the transport and aggregation network. This part of the all-IP network supports various access technologies using copper lines, optical fiber and air as transmission media. Schematic courtesy Nokia Siemens Networks.

This is a high-level view of next-generation networking. Additional intelligence will be introduced to enable seamless access to services and applications using different networks and network technologies in smart ways — ways that improve the quality of experience and minimize congestion. Services and applications will be mainly hosted in the Internet and in the case of enterprises, the corporate intranet. In addition, service continuity will be ensured while moving between different network technologies and the different networks of one or more operators. This is a very visionary concept and it comes from Nokia Siemens Networks. A white detailed paper (PDF) titled “Smart Connectivity – A vision of tomorrow’s connected world” can be downloaded from Nokia Siemens' website.

CONCLUSION

VoIP and cellular telephony have matured, moved on and converged. In future we’ll have powerful connectivity solutions for heterogeneous networks that enable easy, transparent and efficient access to professional and consumer services — anytime and anywhere — on our preferred communications device.

Bob Emmerson is an English national living in the Netherlands. He has a degree in electronic engineering and mathematics from London University and now works as an all-round freelance writer, focusing on Information and Communications Technology. He has written two books plus articles and columns for a number of international publications, most of which are (sadly) no longer with us, e.g. Byte: an IT bible. Send your praise or flame messages to: [email protected].