The "C" is for convergence, which is what Cincinnati Bell is after as the first U.S. carrier to launch unlicensed mobile access and bridge the mobile phone with the home Wi-Fi network

Much has been made of the launch of unlicensed mobile access by T-Mobile this summer, but a month before the carrier made its big splash, another operator had UMA services up and running: Cincinnati Bell. The scale and scope of its launch may not be as big as T-Mobile's, but Cincinnati Bell's ambition is just as great.

In its small footprint in southwestern Ohio, Cincinnati Bell faces fierce competition from national cable and wireless providers. Fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) is the way that Cincinnati Bell feels it can differentiate itself from its big rivals. Its new CB Homerun UMA service ties customers to the ILEC's other products, whether it's wireline voice, DSL or video, said David McNaughton, senior vice president of consumer markets for Cincinnati Bell.

“We're one of the few companies that sells all products,” McNaughton said. “We may be limited by territory, but we can still make full-scale product launches. We have competition on the cellular side and on the wireline side, but Homerun is the only product that brings both networks together.”

UMA is a technology developed specifically for GSM that allows terminals to roam seamlessly between wireless LAN networks and the GSM voice network. Instead of using session initiation protocol-based voice over IP, the UMA network tunnels the GSM signal through the public Internet. It improves in-building penetration and saves spectrum capacity, allowing carriers to reallocate those resources.

While both UMA launches use fundamentally the same technology, there are some key differences in their strategies. T-Mobile, as a pure wireless provider, is aiming at landline replacement. The key message of its advertising is “dump your home line.” Meanwhile, Cincinnati Bell is doing the opposite. It's trying to retain and grow its wireline base with Homerun by knitting the services together, said Lance Reid, director of new product development for Cincinnati Bell.

Homerun will work on any broadband connection, but its price drops to $10 per month when a customer subscribes to Cincinnati Bell DSL.

Cincinnati Bell is moving toward a single-number service where outside callers to the home line are prompted to choose which family member to contact, each of whom is assigned a different ring on the home line. If unanswered, the call is either transferred to the appropriate person's cell phone or sent to a voicemail box, depending on customer preferences. If the call is routed to the cell phone, it becomes an ordinary cellular call. If the call is routed to voicemail, the customer receives a text notification of a home voicemail. Cincinnati Bell plans to make the service seamless, with a unified voicemail box receiving all wireline and wireless calls, Reid said.

Fundamentally, though, T-Mobile and Cincinnati Bell are offering the same value proposition: cheap calls to their customers, said Bill King, president and managing principal of JSI Capital Partners.

The difference is Cincinnati Bell isn't offering a blanket national service but one tailored to the Cincinnati community. That, coupled with its own civic presence, forms loyalty ties to its customers, something an AT&T or a Verizon has much more difficulty doing, King said. “That's their challenge,” he said. “They can't battle on price. It's a scale game, and the smaller guy will always lose.”

While Cincinnati Bell is using UMA to differentiate itself from the big carriers, it's by the grace of the big carriers that it is allowed to deploy the technology. Contrary to the wireline space, where small providers often lead with new technology, wireless innovation often is led by the big carriers due to the economies of the handset market, said Steve Shaw, vice president of marketing for UMA vendor Kineto.

“In the mobile space, you have to land a couple of whales because they are the only ones that can get the features and applications in the handset,” Shaw said. “T-Mobile is certainly a company of that size.”

Although Cincinnati Bell launched UMA before T-Mobile, T-Mobile's UMA plans were no secret, which led Nokia and other vendors to develop Wi-Fi/GSM handsets for the U.S. market. Technically UMA is now an option for every other Tier 2 and Tier 3 carrier with a GSM network. With no “whale” to lead the FMC charge and no equivalent standardized technology, CDMA operators — which make up the majority of Tier 2 operators — are seemingly left in the lurch.

But a new technology is on the horizon that may provide an alternative: femtocells. Femtocells work over standard cellular frequencies, but they are backhauled over a broadband connection, making them as handy as UMA without mucking about with Wi-Fi. In fact, it's not just CDMA operators such as Sprint investigating femtocells; many European GSM operators are eschewing UMA in favor of the new technology. Why didn't Cincinnati Bell do the same? Simply a matter of timing.

“UMA is just one option in our bag of tricks,” Reid said. “Femtocells are certainly very interesting, and they're something we're looking into. But we wanted something we could bring to market and get in the hands of customers in a shorter time frame. UMA was the technology to do it.”

KINETO/UMA TIMELINE