Despite the market success in FMC, Orange is not going to stay faithful to UMA. Orange is planning a VCC trial as early as 2008. In fact, Orange France is planning as many as FIVE different FMC trials, all with different technology flavors.
Orange is world’s leading UMA based FMC provider. The non-UMA FMC offerings have not shown much progress yet. As of May 07, Orange had signed up over 257k FMC subscribers in the French market alone. The service was expanded into Spain and is being tried in Poland. Orange has a very aggressive FMC offer for the UK market which is all set to be launched later this year.
So why is Orange so actively looking at non-UMA FMC technologies? Apparently they are not buying Kineto’s argument that UMA extends itself to 3g and femtocells that Kineto is trying to push UMA into. Orange is therefore pursuing other options as well.
And it is not that Orange is trying VCC just as an alternative in order not to be locked into UMA only. They don’t believe that UMA will get out of 2g world and so for 3g and IMS projects they are assuming that voice services will come via VCC standard. They treat VCC as part of IMS architecture.