Carphone Warehouse to offer converged fixed/mobile tariff

THE CARPHONE Warehouse group should launched a converged fixed-line and mobile tariff in the next six to nine months, according to Clive Dorsman from the company's fixed-line arm, Opal Telecom.

Dorsman revealed the motivation behind the Carphone Group's recent acquisition of a 'low power' GSM licence. This will enable it to put so-called 'femto' base stations into businesses and eventually residential properties.

The scheme will therefore much more closely resemble the service O2 offers in Germany - known as Genion - rather than BT's Fusion offering.

Genion makes use of cellular technology to distinguish when a mobile handset is in a 'home zone' as against Fusion which uses Bluetooth/Wi-Fi to connect to a broadband router when 'at home'.

Fusion employs a standard called UMA (Universal Mobile Access). Yet UMA compatible handsets are so few and far between that Carphone wouldn't possibly countenance such a narrow offering, Dorman said.

The Carphone Warehouse is currently struggling to cope with demand for its 'free' broadband service - for which Opal effectively provides the backbone. It has added some 340,000 new users since the offer appeared in April.

It appears that some 50 per cent of the Carphone Warehouse's existing 2.6 million (TalkTalk) users are interested in adding the broadband option.

Dorsman was speaking as he revealed that Opal has invested heavily in the latest (NGN) telecoms gear from Sonus Networks. This deal shows how much opposition the new Nokia Siemens Networks is up against, for example.

Sonus reckons it is number one in the supply of networks which actually carry voice over IP. It means Opal's own network will be ready for when BT actually implements its own NGN telecoms network which it calls C21N.

Having Sonus' gear sitting on its own backbone network, allows the Carphone Warehouse to potentially offer loads of innovative services across its own MVNO, Fresh.

Dormand revealed that the mobile network operators are reluctant to provide the kind of tight integration such offerings would take between the Opal network and their own mobile networks.

By contrast, BT Openreach - the arm of BT which provides physical access to the traditional BT copper (PSTN) network, it bending over backwards to help the Carphone group offer services over its networks.

To date, Talk Talk can be offered to consumers on 1,000 BT exchanges and it is adding additional exchanges at the rate of some 10 to 15 per day. Dorsamn reckons it can reach 2,000 BT exchanges before profitability become and issue. µ