Is Orange 'Unique'? Hardly

John Delaney, Principal Analyst

The Telecom Paper publication reports that Orange/France Telecom has unveiled its Unik fixed-mobile convergent service, launching on 6 October in France and to then be extended to other European markets, including the Netherlands, the UK (where it will be called Unique), Spain and Poland.

The hybrid phone will support VoIP calls when in WiFi coverage and GSM calls when not. Orange France customers will use their regular mobile number for the service. It's reported that two handsets will be available at launch, the Nokia 6136 and Samsung P200, followed by the Motorola A910 in November.

Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) as a consumer voice service is definitely turning out to be a bandwagon. With today's announcement, Orange/France Telecom becomes the last of the European big-four incumbents to launch its FMC offering.

Orange's 'Unique' joins BT's 'Fusion', Deutsche Telekom's 'T-One' and Telecom Italia's 'Unica' in the line-up of fixed line incumbents' bids to reverse the current trend of voice minutes migrating from fixed to mobile networks.

So in that sense, 'Unique' it ain't. But is Orange's FMC offering likely to succeed? In my view, it has the same weaknesses of the other current FMC offerings on the market or in development. These include a very limited handset choice, and lack of true seamlessness in network handover.

Compare these offerings with the other approach to a 'one-phone' service being taken by the German mobile operators with their homezone tariffs. With these offerings customers can have any (mobile) phone they want, and seamlessness is not an issue because no network handover takes place. Such fixed-to-mobile substitution (FMS) services have racked up some impressive subscriber figures. T-Mobile, for instance, reported that seven months after the launch of its @Home service, it signed up 700,000 customers.

Contrast this performance with that of FMC. In May, nine months after launch, BT's Fusion was reported to have about 30,000 customers. Telecom Italia's Unica is limited by regulation to 30,000 customers for the first six months after launch. And although it is too soon for Deutsche Telekom to release any customer figures for T-One, I do not expect them to be significantly more impressive. As long as the inherent drawbacks of current FMC implementations remain, I believe that Orange is unlikely to be any more 'Unique' in terms of customer uptake, than in any other characteristic of its FMC service.

John Delaney is a Principal Analyst in Ovum's Consumer Group. The team analyses the consumer market for data and multimedia services on mobile networks and the Internet, including messaging, information and entertainment.