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Adding 7-8 mn mobile subscribers every month certainly calls for a celebration but service providers (SPs) are not really happy. SPs are losing money because of their inability to provide customers reliable data connectivity.

Customer churn could be a small picture in the whole scenario but the bigger picture is the number of call drops that are happening on their networks. And the scarcity of spectrum adds to subscriber woes. Fixed service providers, on the other hand, are simply watching their customers being allured by mobility. At the same time, many of them are being accused of wasting last-mile connectivity.

While the rest of the world has found a way to address most of these issues, telecom service providers (fixed, mobile, and integrated) in India know all these magical solutions too well, but they are not using these solutions. This is strange because the industry in India is still growing and with its high growth rate, it should have no hesitation in picking up magic formulae that can actually deliver them a bigger share of their customer's wallet.

Why Convergence?

The current favorite architecture for achieving convergence is IMS. While IMS can be implemented over 3G, the buzz at Barcelona was around implementing IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) over UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). Both these technologies are being tested all over the world but no such testing is in sight in India in the near future.

Technology is not the major issue holding back the rolling-out (or even pilot trials) of converged networks in India. Essentially, IMS is the equivalent of IP for telecom. It will enable all the IP communications services in their full mobile glory.

UMA is now the 3GPP standard for enabling subscriber access to mobile services over Wi-Fi and broadband IP networks. The two can enable wireless communications to a mobile phone to be seamlessly transferred to a micro cell that will cater to very few (perhaps just even one) handsets.

The 'backhaul' for this cellsite will be the broadband network at the customer premises and the normal radio network outside the premises. The last few meters in the premises could be over WLAN/Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, UWM (ultra wide band), or any other available.

These networks are already in place in many enterprises and homes today, and are being used via PCs, palmtops, and iPods. Using IMS and UMA, fixed service providers can attempt to create loyalty among their customers, and mobile service providers can attempt to increase their ARPUs.

What's Coming in the Way?

The mere suggestion of convergence is disallowed by the regulatory regime. The IP Telephony Act specifically prohibits the termination of PSTN and private networks/Internet on the same machine. In enterprises, even PBXes for these two resources have to be maintained separately. In the limited cases where BPOs are allowed to terminate the two on the same PBX, they have to promise and ensure that they will strongly desist from trying to converge the two networks.

Besides regulations, many other issues are coming in the way of fixed mobile convergence. A fixed mobile converged network presumes at the very least a high-speed broadband network. The number of these lines in the country was around 3 mn last January. With such a small base, a commercial rollout of FMC is highly unlikely. Poor QoS is another spoilsport. The mobile network is unreliable. At its worst, it is just not there.

Telecom service providers will depend on system integrators to roll out these services, as they may not have the expertise or patience to do large-scale rollouts of LANs. If these services are priced at a flat rate, there will be no incentive of cost for taking up these services. If the usage of WAN and LAN networks is to be priced differentially, especially with seamless call handover between the two networks, the OSS/BSS application will have to transcend to the next generation.

The story with all the above issues has a chicken and egg analogy with demand and policy. If there was a demand from customers, all other issues could be easily overcome, and policies too may accommodate it. But the demand for converged services cannot arise till they are considered a crime.

IMS Advantage
IMS offers operators the opportunity to build an open IP-based service infrastructure that will enable an easy deployment of new multimedia communication services, mixing telecom and data services. It can support service convergence by providing a common set of services across fixed and mobile networks; and it provides network convergence by providing cost savings that come with a single, core IP network. IMS is being looked at as the road to convergence because it enables technology-agnostic access to multimedia services.

IMS is an internationally recognized standard; it specifies interoperability and roaming and it provides bearer control, charging, and security. What is more, it is well integrated with the existing voice and data networks while adopting many key characteristics of the IT domain. This makes IMS a key enabler for fixed-mobile convergence and value-based charging.

At its core, it is an IP multimedia and telephony network. It is defined by 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) and 3GPP2 standards and organizations based on IETF Internet protocols. It is access independent as it supports IP-to-IP sessions over wireline IP, 802.11, 802.15, CDMA, and packet data along with GSM/EDGE/UMTS and other packet data applications.

It is a standardized reference architecture consisting of session control, connection control, and an applications services framework along with subscriber and services data.

IMS was developed as an umbrella framework by the 3GPP to provide IP-based services. It originally planned to develop specifications only for 3G GSM; however, it has gone beyond that now. To date, two phases, known as Release 5 and Release 6, have been published for IMS which lay out the specifications for an IP/SIP-based network services architecture, catering to both the fixed and mobile broadband.

Current Trends
There have not been any trends to speak about, as FMC is in an early stage in the Asia Pacific and even in a nascent stage in India. Service providers in India may start with Pre-IMS, skip UMA and may jump to IMS directly. But it would be too early to comment on this since successful adoption of FMC also depends on deployment of 3G and Wi-Fi. Pre-IMS services could mainly be applications like instant messaging and photo sharing.

The contribution of value added services (VAS) is increasing steadily and is expected to form a major portion of FMC revenues in the near future. Even as the FMC services market gains traction, the go-to-market strategy of service providers should be to provide a variety of FMC compliant dual mode handsets to customers.

Indian telcos are still focused on meeting the high demand for basic voice, but are gradually opening up to generate demand for converged service offerings.

Rising income, declining handset prices, and increasing awareness of the available mobile services among the masses has led to the growing adoption of mobility solutions. The youth segment and rural areas are major areas of growth.

Not only is FMC the solution to provide rich media services to the end customer, fixed mobile convergence also provides both fixed and mobile operators a magical solution to not only provide high-end services to subscribers but entails the convergence of access networks and help them integrate their forces to tap the huge potential of rural India. The telecom network in the country is not intensive and teledensity is low, particularly in rural areas.

But India has a lot of advantages; 670,000 km of optical fibers have been laid in India by operators, even in interior areas, and the process continues. BSNL alone has laid optical fibers to 30,000 of their 35,000 exchanges, thus having a fiber connection down to an average of twenty villages.

Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in