You might be thinking that fixed mobile convergence (FMC) is hardly a hot topic nowadays and wondering why I’m writing about it.
Well, right after I got back to the office after my vacation in Colombia, I realized that I had lost my business SIM card. So, I was initially disconnected since I have both my fixed and mobile work extensions centralized on my mobile phone. Luckily, we keep some unassigned SIMs in the office, and the issue was solved quite fast. I managed to receive some calls even before I went for lunch.
Do you agree with me that it has become hard to identify what a converged solution looks like as there are so many different flavors of FMC in the Unified Communications (UC) and cloud-based PBX market?
The more I think about it, the more I believe that only mobile-fixed operators can provide a true and cost-effective converged solution. Why?
Advantageous Position in the Cloud Communications Market
Well, remember that you, as a mobile-fixed operator, can offer your enterprise clients a converged solution where integration occurs within your networks. This puts you in an advantageous position compared to any other player in the cloud communications market. Let me tell you a little bit more about these advantages.
Consider the fact that your customers wouldn’t even need a smartphone as a prerequisite for having the benefits of a converged solution. The experience provided to the user is device agnostic, and the user does not rely on having to load an application or software onto his/her mobile. In fact, everything is done natively on the phone; therefore, having no impact on battery life, no interference with the native dialer of the phone or no need for maintaining two different address books.
Additionally, you can offer your enterprise customers a cost-effective solution in which the mobile number acts like any other extension. Therefore, users are not only able to seamlessly route incoming and on-going calls between fixed devices and mobiles, but can also do all of this without having to incur any additional costs.
Let’s also not forget that you can detect a global presence across the devices of the users. For instance, you know when a user is busy on a call over his/her mobile device and therefore avoid forwarding any other calls to the user’s fixed device, or the other way around.
Last but not least, I believe that your customers will be extremely glad to hear that you can simplify their billing process by providing a single invoice for their fixed- and mobile voice traffic as well as for their mobile data voice and broadband.
As you can see, offering an outstanding and truly converged fixed and mobile solution for your enterprise customers is well within your reach. Our recent blog highlighted how you can provide your customers with so much more using a softphone based on WebRTC. In fact, with such a softphone I wouldn’t have been so worried about losing my SIM in the first place, as I could have just logged in, made and received calls directly on the browser without having to install any software.