They are two Tier 1 independent wireline phone companies 400 miles apart in the heart of the Midwest. Both were spun off from their wireless parents in 2006, both are addressing rural markets, both have grand broadband ambitions and both are getting off to a fine start with investors in their debut earnings calls and beginning life with oodles of cash. But they go in opposite directions when it comes to their wireless strategies. Can they both be right?

Embarq, the former wireline business of Sprint, and Windstream, the former wireline business of Alltel, have exhibited an all-or-nothing approach to wireless that appears at first glance to defy logic.

Embarq partnered with former parent Sprint to form a mobile virtual network operator and is aggressively deploying advanced wireless capabilities, including a fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) solution it launched last month to the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market.

Windstream, on the other hand, chose to set its wireless ambitions aside for now to more aggressively pursue broadband and digital TV deployments. So how can wireless be so core to one company's plans and so non-essential to another?

It's easy, said Andy Seybold, head of the Andrew Seybold Group consulting firm. “Nobody knows whether the triple play or quadruple play is really what people want,” he said. “There is no market research that says they are dead on. So everyone is learning as they go.”.

Experimenting with an investment the size of what will be required for FMC can be risky, but Seybold said it is not too early for a company such as Embarq to introduce FMC, especially to the SMB market.

“They will be much earlier adopters than large corporations, which are slow and conservative,” Seybold said. “And I am sure the large [operators] are very happy that the Embarqs of the world are taking this risk first.”

That SMB segment, said Embarq CEO Daniel Hesse, is his company's most profitable. In building for its future, he said, Embarq would focus on bringing innovation to that market.

“And in a few short months, we have achieved many market firsts,” Hesse said.

One of those firsts was the launch of SmartConnect, the company's FMC offering, which it introduced last month to Charlottesville and Fayetteville, N.C.; Ft. Meyers, Fla.; Las Vegas; Mansfield, Ohio; and Orlando.

It's too early for adoption numbers on FMC, but overall, Embarq has attracted approximately 24,000 subscribers in just more than three months.

“Our newest growth business is wireless,” Hesse said. “Wireless growth will drive revenue, reduce churn and contribute to the bottom line once we achieve the necessary scale.”

Where Embarq is concentrating on revenue growth and innovation, Windstream is focused on heading off competition. The FMC market may grow to $80 billion by 2009 as Pyramid Research has said, but Windstream CEO Jeff Gardner said it can wait.

“Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the potential benefits and associated costs and complexities of entering the wireless business as a reseller,” Gardner said. “Our conclusion, at least for the time being, is that wireless would not materially benefit our bundle or meaningfully reduce access line losses.”

He said driving broadband and digital TV penetration was more important to customer retention, particularly in front of a competitive cable voice offering. As Gardner said, this was no hasty decision. When he took on the role of CEO at Windstream, Gardner brought with him a management team steeped in wireless. If they helped make the decision to forego the technology, it must have been painstakingly prudent.

There is a growing sense, particularly among independent telcos, that wireless is not an essential part of the bundle. As Patrick Kelly, partner and co-founder of OSS Observer, said, “The quad play is a longer-term strategy that will make better sense once the right network is in place.”

Seybold said companies such as AT&T are moving quickly to an IP multimedia subsystem network, which would better enable FMC, but that others are not moving as fast. There are a lot of questions about when voice over IP is really going to be a wireless play, he said, which makes FMC a whole lot easier. “There's a lot of doubt in people's minds that it will be here before 2010,” Seybold said.

That leaves Windstream plenty of time to reconsider its wireless choice, which Gardner said it would do if market developments warranted it. Until then, there isn't much point trying to figure out who was right and who wasn't.