..Fusion starts the European race for Fixed Mobile Convergence
You won’t ever believe this but I had a private bet with myself that BT would plump for Fusion as its brand name for the fixed-mobile service it had, until this month, kept under the wraps of the working title Project Bluephone.
As I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t have found a bookie to take a bet on such a gamble, I’m also sure I wouldn’t have put my real money where my thoughts were, but by some mixture of coincidence (the local gym where I live, and which taunts me as I scurry past each evening, untoned and unfit, is called Fusion) and intuition, (it’s quite a common term for concepts that blend two existing entities) I had stumbled upon BT’s chosen moniker. How exciting for me.
Anyway, brand name aside, the service was met with a fair reception, not least because analysts and competitors are not really sure how the service is going to go, what effect it will have on BT and on its rivals. One thing that struck me is that, try as BT might to make it as simple and mass market as possible, the product still requires a certain technical confidence from the user. Consumers will need a special handset, a Bluetooth/ WiFi hub, and of course a DSL line. So what is the motivation to do that? Landline replacement with its wires and fixed location? A single number? Cheaper calls?
Well of course the first is already a non-issue in many homes due to DECT and cordless phones. The second may be a factor for people, but you don’t necessarily need to go to the trouble of installing wireless hubs and DSL lines just for the privilege of using your mobile all the time. You can do that anyway, and given that “most” people are at home at the weekends and evenings (with apologies to students, the unemployed and those caring for children or others) using your mobile all the time at those hours is either free or virtually so under most call plans already.
So that’s that then, the driver to change simply isn’t enough to take us beyond our usual resistance to do so. Consumers will follow a bargain but not if they think it is just not worth the hassle. Witness the backlash to the many cold calls being made offering slashed rates on fixed calls themselves. The price proposition may make sense but the sense of being slammed puts people off. Another point that occurs is that under BT’s price plan, the cost of calling a mobile from a Fusion phone will remain the same. See, if everyone is going to have a mobile phone only, from now on, that means nearly all of our calls are going to be to mobiles. So BT will surely then be forced to reduce that fixed to mobile premium, or else customers will be reaching for their old fixed phones again.
So there are still challenges there for BT. And opportunities for their rivals who simply have to ask their customers if they are attracted to the concept of using their mobile whilst in the home, at fixed line prices. If the answer is yes, there’s a much easier solution than BT’s. Simply keep using your mobile and we’ll either give you a “home tariff” or time sensitive billing, as we do already.
One thing Fusion does do is make BT a Vodafone customer, as it is a Virgin Mobile customer for its newly announced mobile music service. It raises BT Mobile as a brand in its own right, and widens its service portfolio and gives it differentiation. From that point of view mobile operators all over Europe need to think carefully about how they will combat the threat, especially from incumbent fixed operators, of well resourced MVNOs offering attractive “point” services.