Despite the hype, fixed-mobile convergence hasn’t made huge inroads in the market, for a variety of reasons. But when I was at my local Target store yesterday, I noticed these:
It’s a little unit from GE that you plug your standard home phone into, and connect to your mobile via Bluetooth, turning your mobile connection into a de facto home fixed line. Mildly interesting, I think, as it gives people who want to keep a home phone yet another way to give up their traditional landline. In the US market, the ability to add a line to an existing family plan, then keep it hooked up to this sort of machine for home use, could be compelling for some users. I’m a little hard pressed to think of too many other use cases… perhaps another would be if you get bad reception in your home or another location, you could place the device and your phone wherever the signal’s strongest, then use your cordless phone to roam around the house.
In either case, these sorts of applications aren’t things that people are going to be willing to pay an ongoing monthly charge for, particularly if fairly cheap one-off solutions like this device exist. And that, in the long run, may be the real issue for operator-based FMC services.
The main issue with FMC is that all you need is a mobile: personal, always-with-you etc. As also (very) young people have them, there’s little reason for a family/house phone any longer, and young people need to text too (maybe more than speak). Sure, fixed is less costly, but you need mobiles anyway.
There’s of course nothing stopping families to have a mobile phone for common use, but why hook it up to a fixed line phone, even if it’s cordless? The coverage argument can hardly be a strong argument.
Plenty of reasons… multiple extensions throughout the house, ability to more reliably and accurately provide location information to 911 call centers, and so on.
Sure, for many/most people, only having a mobile will suffice, but there are still plenty of people who want a home phone.
FMC also means extending your home/fixed line to mobile. How usefull it will be to handle your home-calls on mobile and placing home calls from mobile (not using mobile minutes). It will be great to have mobility at landline tariff.
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