Market factors converging for UMA

Convergence, not surprisingly, was a common theme at last week's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with announcements related to both of the technology concepts — unlicensed mobile access and the IP multimedia subsystem architecture — that are expected to guide the traditional mobile industry toward a future of seamless integration with fixed Wi-Fi and wireline networks.

Nokia and Motorola may have stolen the convergence spotlight last week by each announcing availability of a UMA-enabled handset due out in the second quarter of this year. Nokia also announced its UMA network controller platform, officially bringing another of the network equipment giants into this competitive market.

Consultancy inCode Wireless last month put out a white paper stating essentially that the first two quarters of this year will be prime time for UMA to make a market impact and become the basis for early fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) projects.

Frost & Sullivan also recently released a report on UMA suggesting that many of the trials of late last year will turn to commercial offerings during the first half of this year.

Many in the industry have wondered if UMA has only a brief window of opportunity before IMS takes on a larger role in the evolution of FMC. The Frost & Sullivan research painted UMA as an early-phase approach to FMC. The inCode white paper notes that UMA and IMS can be complementary — UMA being the technological basis for FMC to occur in existing access networks, and IMS being the future foundation for convergent applications in multiple types of access realms.

The 3GSM activity further enhances and solidifies UMA's market position, at least partially because the availability of UMA-enabled handsets in volume and from enough different vendors has been considered a still-enigmatic gating factor for UMA's success. Nokia's handset will be used in Orange's upcoming UMA-based FMC service rollout.

In other recent news, UMA pioneer Kineto Wireless announced it has partnered with Cisco Systems and completed a UMA call over Cisco's server and security gateway architecture. Also, session border controller vendor Netrake recently announced its own UMA security gateway. This news followed last year's inclusion of UMA in the 3GPP standards efforts.

“3GPP support was enormous to this effort,” said Steven Shaw, director of marketing for Kineto. “Until the standard was ratified, you had to do proprietary UMA network controllers, and many service providers have an aversion to proprietary platforms. Now you see a lot of wireline guys who are accelerating UMA projects to control mobile substitution, and anyone can make a UMA controller.”