CEO View

I was very fortunate and somewhat humbled to be asked to make the opening remarks at an industry ‘do’, which was attended by an array of talented executives and associated industry alumni at the Finnish Ambassador’s Residence in London recently. 

The topic was Fixed Wireless Convergence (FMC) and I opined and whined that none of the mobile operators were yet giving me what I wanted for my version of FMC.  This I summarised as:

1. A single handheld device for both my office and mobile phone
2. Private and mobile billing from the one device
3. PBX capability e.g. call transfer
4. Integrated business and social contacts
5. Uninhibited WiFi access including for internet calls

There were enough senior execs from all the mobile companies there to hear my plea; we shall see whether or not they were sufficiently moved by it to act.

We shall of course be happy to work in detail with any of the operators that would like to partner in such a joint venture and are looking for a company to provide symmetrical wireless Internet connectivity to allow in building calls to be routed over the Internet rather than the mobile network.

If my own view on what would be useful FMC comes to pass, it does pose some interesting questions for the industry though.  Two of my favourite ones are:

• If I don’t need a land line phone, why do I need a Wireline telephone system?
• If I don’t need a Wireline telephone system, why do I need a telephone line?

At our offices, we don’t have telephone lines, just a big fat intelligent Internet connection. 
Perhaps not such off the wall questions to pose after all!

The evening’s event was rather splendidly organised by Perry LeDain of Finpro http://www.finpro.fi/en-US/Finpro/ and sponsored by Concilio networks of Espoo, Finland. 

Cheers, Ian