CREATING CONVERGENCE WITH UMA

Still, some industry watchers have insisted that UMA has a brief window of opportunity in which to succeed, with IMS, a technology that supports convergent services from a core network architectural level, looming on the horizon. In some cases, UMA has been discussed as if it were an alternative or competing technology, which isn't the case, Shaw said.

“Part of the confusion is where the value proposition is and to whom,” he said. “UMA is not competitive with IMS or with SIP. It's the access solution that allows convergent services to happen. IMS is a core network philosophy.”

Northstream's Nordstrom added, “The belief that UMA has a brief window of opportunity is a very engineering-minded point of view. If it did, companies wouldn't deploy it; they would wait. But some of them believe they have a market to chase right now and that UMA can help.”

If anything, UMA may be forging a new kind of access medium that IMS can connect to and build upon through the long-term future. Nordstrom said the two technologies can coexist fairly separately for a few years, but eventually, there are likely to be a variety of session initiation protocol (SIP)-based handsets that contain both UMA and IMS technology.

Despite several carrier commitments and a future path that will complement IMS while also taking advantage of IMS' slower journey to market, there have been other persistent questions about how quickly UMA can become a technology deployed in large volumes. In particular, market watchers were getting antsy earlier this year when only three handset manufacturers — none of them among the top five companies in device market share — had committed to produce UMA handsets.

However, the tide has begun to turn on both sides of the equation. Ericsson's unlicensed network controller (UNC), like Kineto's, is already available, and equipment giants Motorola and Alcatel also are coming to market with UMA gear. Meanwhile, Kineto recently forged two significant partnerships — with Nokia on the infrastructure side and with LG on the handset side — that should help propel UMA to some further variety and volume in both areas.

Nokia has not yet announced further details of its UMA infrastructure plan, but Pekka Virrola, director of convergence network systems for Nokia, said in announcing the partnership with Kineto, that UMA will be an important part of Nokia's ongoing end-to-end IP network strategy.

Many of the same vendors that are building UMA network gear also are some of the biggest names in the IMS standardization effort, though so far, there still are at least three notable vendors — Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Siemens — that have not announced an equipment strategy for UMA. A spokesman for Lucent said the company is still evaluating the technology.

“There are infrastructure vendors out there that aren't doing UMA yet, but they don't even have to because they can sell their equipment around someone else's UNC, like ours,” Shaw said.

For now, UMA-based UNCs are only available for GSM-based networks, but Nordstrom said it would be relatively easy to incorporate UMA technology in a CDMA network.

Meanwhile, the handset market for UMA also is gradually taking shape with support from LG and others. LG said its UMA handset, the CL400, will be available commercially in the fourth quarter of this year. Nokia and Samsung also plan to produce handsets, though neither has provided details on availability. Meanwhile, Motorola has two current phone models with built-in UMA compliance, including the popular Razr handset. The company also will have third UMA handsets available by the first quarter of next year, according to a company spokeswoman. A total of six handset-makers have now committed to making UMA devices.

“There will be deployment quantities of handsets in first quarter or second quarter of 2006,” Shaw said.

Northstream's Nordstrom doesn't question the eventual availability of large quantities of UMA handsets, but he said it will more likely be late in 2006 before enough handsets are available to give carriers and their customers adequate choices.

“I think it looks promising,” Nordstrom said. “But you really need to have 10 or 15 types of handsets available; otherwise, I don't think you have a full market.”