Back in high school, one of my friends skipped school to see “The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen” at the local artsy theater. He spent the next week raving about a young actress named Uma. “She’s so beautiful. She’s so talented. She’s the next big thing.” I’ve never really understood the fascination with Ms. Thurman, but when I recently heard someone refer to the technology known as Unlicensed Mobile Access (or is it Universal Mobile Access?) as if it were a woman’s first name, I couldn’t help but consider my own thoughts about the technology…after rolling my eyes and checking to make sure it wasn’t my old friend who was recently brought up on stalking charges.

In short, while my friend may have gone gaga for the woman, I’ve traditionally been suspect of the technology.

Luckily, on this front, I’ve had a lot of people to support my thinking. First positioned as a technology to seamlessly bridge GSM calls onto a WLAN network, a broad lack of dual-mode phones was hailed as the technology’s weak point. Then, as IMS hype began to capture operator attention, UMA and its RAN-like architecture was labeled as anachronistic, at best a stop-gap until the inevitable ubiquity of IMS paved the way for dual-mode services thanks to the VCC (Voice Call Continuity) standard. Now, as operators begin testing femtocells, UMA as a platform for dual-mode phone services is positioned as crude in comparison to the elegance of having your own 3G base station at home. Estimates of maybe 1.5 million UMA subscribers at key proponents Orange and T-Mobile (after a year or so of service availability), and pullbacks at early supporters like BT and Telecom Italia don’t do much to refute the detractors.

For the record, UMA likes to go by the name of GAN (generic access network) within the 3GPP and – as the name implies – it’s not just about routing GSM voice over dual-mode phones. Ultimately, UMA is about supporting 3GPP connectivity (that’s GSM and UMTS today) over any network supporting IP connectivity. This could be WLAN. This could be a femtocell connected to IP transport. This could be a softphone client sitting on your laptop. Heck, it could even be an LTE or HSPA network.

Against this backdrop, I think the UMA industry has done pretty well. It’s created a coherent job description for itself: an enabler for cellular operators to offer, “home zone” services over IP connections. Integrated into the 3GPP, UMA is standardized for GSM and UMTS – lending it some legitimacy and providing the architectural clarity that IMS sometimes lacks. With more than a dozen UMA phones announced, device development has been admirable…if not spectacular. With support from IMS stalwarts like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and NSN (and a host of supporting players), network ecosystem development has been more impressive. And, while a focus on femtocell integrations argues for the flexibility of the technology, the real advantage UMA can claim as an FMC technology today is its customer base; a million or so subscribers may not be impressive, but it beats out most anything else out there.

Services and technology aside, though, I appreciate UMA for its practicality; its trials and tribulations (reported successes and failures) speak to market realities we should all know by now. In particular, they speak to the fact that new technologies are scary to operators. Don’t get me wrong, service providers have a deep interest in anything that can help them ramp revenues or cut costs. But, when their service reputation is on the line, they have a reason to move slow – even slower when technology advances involve a new, untested way of building network and service offerings. To some extent, this helps to explain the slow uptake of IMS-based services (not just deployments) and the relative obscurity of VCC. More importantly, it also helps to explain the attractiveness of UMA – a technology whose architecture more closely resembles the operator’s radio access network and allows operators (in the near-term) to exploit the value of WiFi in the device or a femtocell in the home while still maintaining a touch point on the user and delivering on the promise of solid service handoff.

Of course, since UMA has become the poster child for consumer dual-mode handset (DMH) services, the question of DMH vs. femtocells is worth a visit.

Again, any supposed conflict between UMA’s support for one or the other is a false dichotomy; UMA can support the integration of femtocells into an operator’s network. Yet, any supposed battle between femtocells and dual-mode phones is equally artificial. Both will co-exist. Why? Femtocells support traffic offload from an operator’s 2G or 3G RAN while leveraging an operator’s spectrum assets and the widest array of devices. Dual-mode solutions leverage a global base of WLAN deployments whether or not any specific operator is present there (think the enterprise and international markets).

What does this mean for UMA? It means that opportunities will exist for UMA in the femtocell and dual-mode handset markets. It doesn’t, however, make UMA a lock for dual-mode support. Migrations away from UMA in the UK and Italy suggest that plain old SIP may be just fine. Limited success for Orange outside of France and T-Mobile International’s interest public in femtocells suggests that commercial momentum isn’t going to take off any time soon on a global scale. Likewise, as 4G emerges and the 4G core moves to subsume 2G and 3G networks, IP will insinuate itself deep and wide. By this point, we can only hope that IMS is mature and accepted, opening the door for better competition from VCC solutions…particularly since operators are already beginning to talk about VCC as a solution for managing handoff between 4G and legacy networks.

When will this all materialize? With initial 4G launches not planned for another few years and IMS a near-term pariah based on over-hyping, it might make it onto my 2010 Christmas list. Which leads us to another network reality: installed networks tend to live for a long time and once you’re in that network, you’ve got a prized position which is difficult to unseat. This explains the urgency of getting UMA into femtocell launches and getting UMA operators some new device support: time is of the essence in pushing UMA deeper into operator networks. Yet, even if UMA never evolves into its own industry generating lots of revenues, I’m not sure it matters to me. I don’t like the technology for its success, its elegance or even the fact that it works as billed. I admire the “little engine that could” attitude and a flexibility that is constantly arguing for its role in the face of new technologies: 3G, LTE, IMS, femtocells, etc. In the same way that Ms. Thurman has transformed herself from an ingénue to a comedic actress to an action star, I’d like to think this can keep it on the stage…if never actually becoming a star.

Peter Jarich is principal analyst for wireless infrastructure for Current Analysis.