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Monday, November 24, 2008

When is UMA not UMA? Part 2

I mentioned last week that I'd been confused by T-Mobile US, which was using "UMA" as its network name for inbound roamers to the US, irrespective of whether they had WiFi in their phones.

Since then, I've also met a couple of (generally knowledgeable) industry folk who are starting to use "UMA" as a generic term for any dual-mode WiFi/cellular solution. I even heard it used in the context of enterprise-centric solutions.

I suspect that this is purely a US thing, as T-Mobile's Hotspot@Home is probably the highest-profile dual-mode service in the market at present, and is often compared against the Sprint Airave femtocell service.

Other non-carrier dual-mode solution providers (Cisco, Divitas, fring, Truphone et al), should perhaps start deploying some marketing firepower to correct this misapprehension.

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