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TeliaSonera relaunches Home Free - again

Carrie Pawsey

TeliaSonera relaunches Home Free - again

This week TeliaSonera announced a relaunch of its Home Free service, which uses UMA technology to provide better in-building mobile coverage. The latest revision is the availability of a 'free' calls package for calls made while in the home for a set monthly fee. Despite this addition, we still believe that Home Free will have limited long-term impact.

TeliaSonera addresses two key failings with previous offers

TeliaSonera has been playing around with its UMA service since its first launch in Denmark back in 2006. There have been two key issues for TeliaSonera. The first was making the technology simple to use and the second was finding a way to commercialise it.

By its own admission TeliaSonera overcomplicated the early products, but this latest revamp is much simpler and therefore solves the first issue. The second issue lies more with the strategic relevance of the technology. It seemed TeliaSonera found an interesting technology in UMA which impressed the engineering part of the business, but it struggled to market it to the consumer. TeliaSonera now packages the router in two ways. The first is a below-the-line retention tool to provide better in-building coverage for those customers that have an issue and threaten to churn. The latest announcement sees TeliaSonera turning the product into a revenue generator, offering it above the line with a homezone tariff package.

Dual-mode UMA services have a limited lifecycle

Despite TeliaSonera addressing two key issues, we still believe that the product will have limited impact. This is because there are fundamental issues around the limited range of UMA handsets that will prohibit mass-market success. Many operators are keen to provide homezone solutions and encourage users to offload data traffic when in the home, and UMA solves both these issues. However, in the long term we believe femtocells are likely to be a more viable solution provided the price continues to decline. More detailed analysis of this can be found in our report UMA update: handsets and femtocells hinder success.

UMA continues to try to find a place for itself in the industry

A few weeks ago we saw the announcement of the VoLGA Forum (Voice over LTE via Generic Access). This is a group of vendors together with T-Mobile USA that are advocating GAN (which is essentially the protocol technology behind UMA) to be included in the standardisation process as one possible way to carry voice in the all-IP world of LTE. At present it's too early to say if it will be successful, and it is likely that there will be more logical alternatives, but nevertheless we congratulate Kineto and the UMA enthusiasts on finding new ways in which to try to extend the life of the technology.

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