Despite an onslaught of new technologies, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is in a holding pattern for now because the applications have developed faster than the business end-user interest.

A recent report by In-Stat said despite the advances on the technology front, adoption of FMC has been slow.

“A wide sweep of industry announcements trumpeting FMC capabilities have been made in 2009; however, our analysis shows only moderate increases in actual use, or planned use, of most applications,” said In-Stat analyst David Lemelin. “IT managers, service providers and integrators may have a good understanding of FMC’s benefits, but until workers actually use its capabilities, the benefits will go unrealized."

Fixed-mobile convergence, which is the transparent and seamless hand-off of active voice calls between cellular and Wi-Fi networks using a dual-mode phone, can be a powerful enabling tool for businesses, reports In-Stat. It provides a viable bridge to address the gap between legacy wireline capabilities, wireless networks and cellular services, as well as evolving VoIP and unified communications capabilities.

Other findings included:

• Business FMC handset connections will jump from 5.8 million in 2009 to 31 million by 2013.
• 19 percent of businesses with Wi-Fi capability use voice over Wi-Fi.
• The ability to seamlessly roam between wireline and wireless networks carries more importance among business users than other FMC solutions, but all FMC solutions remain in a relatively nascent state.