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Carriers Still Not Jumping On Convergence Caravan

According to a a new survey conducted by Infonetics Research, "Nearly 80% of service provider respondents … say they plan to offer fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) services by April 2008, a sharp increase over the number planning to offer FMC services this year." In even better news, a full 100% of carriers intend to offer FMC services just as soon as hell freezes over.

This is one of those surveys that looks more and more bogus the longer you examine it. For one thing, it's easy for carriers to tell research-firm surveys they're going to provide new services -- they can also say they're going to solve global warming and give every subscriber a free pony, and it costs them nothing.

For another, the actual respondents (unidentified in the Infonetics press release) include "senior analysts with 24 North American, European, Asia Pacific, and Latin American-Caribbean service providers … including 12 incumbents and 12 competitive operators." So does that include the Big 4 U.S. carriers, the only ones who really matter on these shores? Who knows? And who cares what a "competitive operator" with a few thousand subscribers in, say, Trinidad and Tobago plans to offer next year?

For some perspective on what these results actually foretell, look a little further down to the discussion of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem, the architecture for delivering multimedia content via Internet protocol to mobile device). More than half the carriers interviewed for the Infonetics study claim they will have a full IMS solution deployed in "at least some part of their network" by 2010. Compare that with the equivalent study from a year ago, when 71% of the service providers said they'd have IMS in place by this year, and it gives you a good gauge of how much faith to put in these kinds of survey answers. Even more telling, a "significant number" of carriers now say they have no IMS plans at all.

Ambitious new service-offering plans, like good intentions, tend to go poof in the harsh light of reality. Karen Hanley, senior marketing director for the Wi-Fi Alliance, who gets paid to be optimistic about such things, says "2008 is the year" for significant converged service offerings. But I'm still not holding my breath that FMC will catch fire among the major U.S. carriers anytime soon. Anyone care to offer evidence to the contrary?

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