The Italian operator Telecom Italia (TI) has terminated its commercial FMC service, blaming interference from the national telecoms regulator, Agcom, and lack of UMA-enabled handsets. The company said that it would now relaunch the Unica service using a SIP-based solution it has developed in-house.

According to TI, after months of investigation, Agcom decided that TI would have to provide a wholesale version of Unica so that competitors could have the chance to provide a similar service. Agcom gave TI six months to achieve this, which has resulted in the company dropping the UMA Unica service despite having worked with Motorola to launch a limited commercial version.

The new SIP-based Unica service has been developed in TI's internal labs and enables client software to be installed on to dual-mode WiFi/cellular handsets. The handset can then determine whether to place calls over WiFi networks or the cellular networks. The company has admitted to discussions with Nokia about pre-installing the Unica client on to its dual-mode phones.

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