Interesting. A blog that focuses on FMC and FMS. I think though that I need to had my little contribution to your views of FMS. FMS does not necessarily have to be taking place through a picocell. From a corporate perspective (and the same applies in the consumer segment), what drives FMC is the objective to divert the traffic onto the IP network for cost purposes, even at the cost of usability and at the cost of the user who pays for the IP backhaul. But there is a key component of FMC: the need to apply the pricing on a specific location, your office or you home. This location angle is the one that Seeker Wireless has taken.

Seeker is a location technology company that has developed a handset/SIM based application which allows to accurately (<50m) and reliably (99.5%) locate the users. Around its core location technology it has developed a service wrap up for “home zone”. Simply put, via the sim tool kit (STK), the application defines a logical zone in which the user is identified as @ home or @ the office and benefit then from a fixed line pricing. The benefits are the likes of usability (STK based, one off registration and visual display on the phone of the zone status), cost savings for the user, retention/acquisition tool for the operator, no waiting UMA/etc phones as compatible with legacy handsets, home zone, office zone, campus zone etc… and many more. It’s for these reasons and more that Seeker has secured two contracts with operators and is working on more opportunities.

Arguably you could raise the issue of coverage as you do in one of your post. We believe that users that are likely to buy a picocells need to be very (emphasis on the very) educated due to usability issues. So they are likely to be adopted by users in so called advanced and rich markets, where operators have 3G networks, networks which they are trying to use the additional capacities with voice service.

Hope this helps adding an additional piece in your already thorough analysis of FMS/FMC. You can appreciate that Seeker is a solution for today without having to wait for new firmware, chipsets, etc… and that the whole service has been build from the ground up around the user. Let me finalise this rather long comment by the tag line that a successful service should be about “convenience, not convergence.”