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Council fixed-mobile trial rings the changes
Case study: Leeds City Council trials FMC

By Jo Best

Published: Thursday 09 November 2006

With 26,000 landlines and more than 7,500 mobiles, Adrian Fegan, head of ICT operations at Leeds City Council, is no stranger to managing a complex telecoms environment.

He's also overseeing a pioneering trial of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) technology, where users have a single device for both landline and mobile calls.

Around 20 of the devices are being piloted at Leeds across two sites, using BT's Corporate Fusion service. With Fusion, council workers can make calls over Vodafone's GSM network when out of the office but once inside council premises, such calls are routed over the local authority's wi-fi system, all using a single dual-mode handset.

BT is hoping the Fusion service will strike a cord with organisations where users make mobile calls while roaming their campus corridors, rather than always being in reach of a desk phone.

According to some estimates, 40 per cent of all mobile call minutes are made on company premises. By routing those calls over wi-fi where possible, the theory goes that companies should be able to trim call charges.

However, the pilot has yet to reveal how using fixed-mobile convergence will affect the organisation's phone bills - but Fegan believes there will be some savings to be had.

Fegan said: "It's about productivity in the workplace, not just about the cost of calls going down… we expect cost reductions but it's hard to quantify at this stage in the game."

He added that the service is delivering as promised: "There are two things that work really well - the single number. And the handover - it really is seamless and it really does work. That's cool."

Like any pilot, the Leeds trial is on something of a learning curve. To keep the wi-fi element of the service on track the council has installed extra wi-fi access points in a corridor connecting two sites to prevent dropped calls as users walk from one area of the campus to another.

Even so, users report some calls are dropped after they've been initiated - around one in 10. Fegan said: "It can be quite frustrating when a user makes a call and gets nothing back."

The council is also hoping for more functionality from the handsets in the system's next iteration, including the ability to filter calls. Fegan joked: "Suppliers cold calling - I can't avoid them."

While Leeds is not currently examining what would happen if the FMC logic were applied to data connectivity, another BT triallist is.

Italian electricity provider ENI, also a Corporate Fusion guinea pig, is looking at routing mobile email traffic over its wi-fi network as a money saving exercise.

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Leeds' IT head is also thinking about what future applications converged technology might make possible for the local authority. More data-centric devices would enable new converged applications - meaning staff could file reports and gather information on their handsets, distributing information back to other local authority agencies in real time.

With the trial scheduled to finish up in November, Leeds is looking at a longer term future for FMC. Fegan will be meeting with the council's business heads to see how convergence can fit into the council at large and will be expanding the council's wi-fi network to make it all happen.

Fegan told silicon.com other councils are watching the results of the trial and added that businesses should also begin examining the possibilities around FMC. "I think any organisation that doesn't look at FMC, at least for the cost savings, is missing the boat."

Equally, the Leeds IT chief believes FMC will also become a more common offering from the operators. "Any mobile provider that doesn't offer a converged solution is going to have some revenue problems pretty quickly," said Fegan.

Other providers are indeed starting to wake up to FMC's potential, including T-Mobile, which has just begun trialling dual-mode services in Seattle. Closer to home, Cable & Wireless has also bought a spectrum licence to offer FMC services and expects to launch its offering next year. Orange too is planning an FMC service under the brand name Unique.