UMA out of favour at Telecom Italia

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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