I’m regularly asked to explain my scepticism of UMA and so-called “seamless” behaviour of dual-mode WiFi/cellular phones.

One of my core beliefs is that consumers will use WiFi-enabled mobile phones in a very different fashion to ordinary cellular-only handsets. They will want the WiFi function to do a lot more than simply extend cellular coverage, and offer transparent “access agnostic” links to existing mobile services.

In particular, I think consumers will want to do a lot more than access “services” with a dual-mode device. They’ll start treating the phone as a piece of home consumer electronics, rather than purely a “service-led” device. They’ll want to get MP3 files from their PC’s hard drive over WiFi, maybe share contacts, and possibly hook into all the other new bits of WiFi-enabled gadgetry around the home. They’ll want to use the phone to browse the web via their broadband connection from the sofa (with no per-MB charges), and use the integrated WiFi to access email, IM, VoIP (yeah, maybe Skype) and all that other good “proper Internet” stuff.

UMA handsets, on the other hand, will tend to usurp most of this in favour of billable operator services, just using your WiFi as a way of tunneling the (locked, walled & expensive) cellular “user experience” over broadband. On some phones you might be able to get at some of the other functions over WiFi, but only if you go down 17 levels of menus & obscure configuration settings, and your operator hasn’t locked all that stuff down.

On the other hand, UMA and its next generation, 3GPP GAN, is actually a standard, while the various approaches using SIP alternatives are more proprietary, and also tend (at the moment) to lack the much-hyped voice seamlessness which I think really isn’t that big a deal.

All of which means I was very happy to find that French broadband operator NeufCegetel appears to agree with me, and is working on a trial dual-mode solution that uses SIP and a proper PC/Internet-integrated smartphone. “Choose music, photos, videos or other documents on your computer or the Internet and load them at high speed”….

…. although maybe, just this once, they should have diverted a few pennies from their clearly very innovative R&D team, and spent a bit more on their marketing & branding efforts…. I mean, I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the Qtek 8300 that NeufCegetel is using isn’t really an UglyPhone, but still, would you want to say you had a “BeautifulPhone”?

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The top four cable players in Netherlands have over 450k households on VoIP, which looks to be about 6% of total households.

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As the Reuters newswire service reports today, the London-based Financial Times newspaper says that networking giant Cisco Systems is planning to be more aggressive in the consumer electronics market.

The article says that Cisco sees phones, radios and home theater equipment that links to the Internet as new product opportunities.

“Consumer electronics companies have been able to compete on a stand-alone device, but the dynamics of the market are changing, ” Cisco chief development officer Charles Giancarlo told the FT. “The Internet and new networking requirements are enough of a disruptor for us to enter a new market.”

That got me to thinking. What kind of Cisco (or Linksys)-branded devices might we see that will be consistent with this revised product-line vision?

Offhand I can think of three:

Consumer-grade VoIP phones, likely sold in partnership with IM-grown-up VoIP service offerings looking to extend their functionality beyond softphone-and-earpiece. It might even be a scaled-down version of the Cisco IP Phone 7985G, which in its current incarnation, looks like this:

Radios that will be able to access Web-based streaming media content and then play that content over home entertainment speakers;

Networkable projection screens that could distribute digital video content throughout the home.

I am sure some of you can think of additional ways in which Cisco can execute their consumer electronics vision.

Got any ideas? Post a TalkBack!

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Marguerite Reardon at ZNet reports that today, Texas Instruments will announce software that will enable VoIP carriers to better manage devices sitting at customer’s offices and homes.

This software will be called Piqua.

Update: Piqua has, in fact, been introduced today.

Sounds like a diagnostic trouble-shooter. For example, if there is an echo on the call, Piqua might be able to pinpoint the problem. The software won’t fix the problem, but will be able to alert a tech to it.

“In an IP service, like VIP, the intelligence is in the phone and not at the central office, like it is in the traditional phone network,” TI’s packet voice and business unit general manager William Simmelink tells Marguerite. “So it’s important for technicians in a call center to be able to control the devices sitting at the customer site.”

Sounds good, but if I am the VoIP subscriber, I would want assurances that the techs are watching. And that the techs are there, not hundreds of thousands of miles away, from where a series of electronic messages that may or may not reach the local foot soldiers are sent much too often.

If VoIP service providers don’t let Piqua do its job, I’ll be piqued.

And so will you.

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That’s digitalMax. No, he’s not selling pills via some jive Internet pharmacy (although the way his eyes are popping out makes you wonder).

No, digitalMax is Cox Cable’s mascot for bundled services that include the Optimum Voice VoIP product. “It’s the multivitamin of digital. And a lot easier to swallow,” he says.

If you don’t believe me that the cable companies are already brandishing the big guns against the pure-play VoIP providers by aggressively pitching their bundled services, then maybe these website pictures from some leading cable system VoIP service offerings will.

Read more

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Siemens OpenScape, one of several powerful suites that provide for real-time collaboration in the enterprise.

Other utilities in that vogue include Nortel’s Multimedia Communications Server and Avaya’s Converged Communications Server.

Network World’s Johna Till Johnson makes a good point about real-time collaboration going mainstream, and telecom vendors and carriers gearing up for it.

Recent research demonstrates that enterprises are getting read to take the plunge,” she writes. “Job titles such as ‘SVP of Collaborative Services’ are starting to crop up, and the average per-seat price that companies are willing to pay for ‘real-time communications dashboards’ has leapt from less than $300 to more than $400.

But I see the opportunity for vendor alliances, costly battles, or both.

What’s going to be real interesting is the bulking up of traditional IM tools to provide some of these same services as the costly branded offerings of Nortel, Siemens and Avaya. Some of this may be done by vendor alliances between the IMs and the companies I’ve just named. But there’s no reason that traditional IMs cannot build their own real-time collaboration offerings.

Melanie Turek of Nemertes Research views these dashboards as compatible with voice-capable IM, but a signficant expansion of corporate IM tool capabilities:

Real-time communications dashboards improve on basic soft phones with robust find me/follow me capabilities and better integrated voice and data communications (so that, for example, caller who’s available by IM might get a text message, rather than a voice mail, from the person he’s trying to reach). Typically, these dashboards are PC-based, and are designed to work with both IP and analog or digital phones.

Melanie then offers a view about how this would work:

Picture a window that displays all your corporate contacts and indicates whether they’re available by phone, IM or e-mail. Most offer click-to-talk capabilities, so users can make a phone call right from their PC, as well as detailed management capabilities at both the end-user and administrator levels, so people can get very specific about who can reach them, as well as how and when. For instance, a user may opt to have the system send his manager directly to his cell phone after hours, but send all other callers to voicemail. Some have built-in audio conferencing, multi-party chat, and even Web conferencing capabilities.

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