IMS,UMA和FMC将怎样影响统一通信

In the old days (1990s) of "unified messaging" a big, overarching program had to be written to gather email, voicemail and faxes into a single inbox and enable a response. It was assumed that the user was tied to the desktop. Indeed, at the time, that was touted as a ‘feature’ (e.g., "Day traders! You don’t have to walk to-and-from a fax machine anymore!"). Today, the concept of FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence) has brought mobility to UC, via the 3GPP’s VCC (Voice Call Continuity) specifications describing how a voice call can be maintained as a user’s mobile phone (usually conceived of now as a dual-mode device) moves between circuit-switched and packet-switched radio domains. This occurred first in the form of UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) for GSM/WiFi (News - Alert) roaming, and now the larger, more general IMS (IP-based Multimedia Subsystem) architecture, which itself allows for more services to be added to those accessible by UC systems, opens up the possibility of triple-or-more-mode phones that could switch among various kinds of networks in an ad hoc manner.

In European countries, there was some initial interest in using DECT (News - Alert) (Digital European Cordless Telephone) and Bluetooth instead of WiFi for the "office" connection. For example, BT’s rebranded Cellnet (BT Cellnet) launched a dual mode DECT/GSM commercial service called OnePhone in May 1999. An Ericsson (News - Alert) dual-mode phone (Ericsson TH688 handset) operated outdoors on the BT Cellnet GSM network as a conventional digital cellular telephone. Within the office or home, however, the phone ran in DECT-mode with a standard domestic DECT GAP base station that’s made by Siemens; a separate DECT handset (from Siemens, who first popularized DECT immensely) was also available as part of the package. The Ericsson phone could answer two numbers: one mobile and one fixed. However, under BT's (News - Alert) Flexinumber scheme, subscribers were given one number-prefixed 070 that automatically redirects them to whichever mode the phone is in at the time of the call.

Another way to add FMC to UC is to place wireless femtocells (formerly called Access Point (News - Alert) Base Stations) that use an Ethernet or broadband connection to link to the Internet or an intranet. Femtocells can provide voice and data services just as a conventional large cellular base station, but on a small scale with the ease of an WiFi access point deployment, so they can fit in a SOHO. There are CDMA-2000 and WiMAX (News - Alert) solutions being developed in this area. Within corporate offices, WiFi appears to be becoming the favored FMC phone system used "internally".

UC users could do with a slick form of mobility, since mobile phone usage in the office has reached preposterous proportions. According to Nokia (News - Alert), 50 percent of employees use a mobile phone for work. Other reports reveal that 28 percent use mobile phones as their primary phone and more than 40 percent of a business mobile phone user’s time is spent away from the desk, with nearly half of that time still on company premises. Moreover, 25 percent of mobile phone users use their mobile phones while seated at their desk.

This had led companies such as XO Communications and Sotto Wireless to jointly develop Unwired Office, a service that gives employees one-number access for integrated wireless voice, email, calendar and contacts, and unlimited domestic long distance and in-building cellular usage.

At NextPoint (News - Alert) , the new combination of NextTone and Reef Point Systems, Mark Neider, Senior Director, says, "What we’re seeing is convergence at the edge of the network. To me, that’s very telling. Operators want to converge different functional elements together. It helps them from a cost, delivery and support perspective, but it also gives them some competitive leverage on the access side – being able to interwork with many different types of end devices in many different ways. So, to me, IMS is a component of it, but FMC is more of a telling term for what’s happening, since that’s exactly what’s happening in the networks today – convergence. IMS is just one of those protocols or architectures that are being implemented."

"Despite an overall movement toward IMS, there are still quite a few adopters of the UMA concept. The ones that I’ve noticed are France Telecom (News - Alert) and T-Mobile here in the U.S. UMA isn’t the only game in town, but it’s got some good subscriber traction. In fact, we’ve we know of some customers who signed up for T-Mobile (News - Alert) service using UMA and they’re pleased with the voice quality, the connectivity. Very positive feedback. So I think UMA is here to stay. But again, it is only one of many architectures or technologies that will be placed on the network edge which leads back to the idea of convergence."

Aaron Sipper (News - Alert), Director of Product Marketing at NextPoint, says, "UMA is just one flavor of FMC and the other item applicable to this topic would dual mode phones and deploying WiFi against the mobile network."

"From my perspective," continues Sipper, "IMS is appealing to operators from the perspective of the reusability of the core and recapturing it for different purposes. So you can have multiple applications leveraging the same common infrastructure as opposed to building out siloed networks. So, in a nutshell, IMS enables the operator to potentially reduce the cost of owning and operating a flexible network that can be shaped and formed to address new and emerging applications. FMC opens up and exploits new territory for the operators via a mobile strategy in terms of unified communications, because UC has been a fixed-line type of service, if you think about it. A sort of "fixed- VoIP" to a large degree. Voice and data have gone pretty much anywhere, but still, I see UC as having been more ‘fixed’ until recently. Now, FMC brings in a mobile context, which is the ‘right’ context for things such as unified communications."

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