What Happened to BT Fusion?

Doing some update work for a client on FMC services, I realised that everything had gone remarkably quiet on the BT Fusion (BT) front of late. I keep hearing about Orange's (comparative) success with Unik, so I had a quick look at the current status of BT's FMC proposition.

Not impressive, I'm afraid.....

Let's see - I'm one of BT's 2m or so Broadband customers, with a Home Hub gateway, so I'm privileged enough to be entitled to Fusion. If I decided to get a new phone today, I could get:

a) A humdrum Nokia (NOK) 6136, ancient Motorola (MOT) A910, or slightly-better Samsung P260 for £19 a month over 18 months, with 100 minutes calling (or 400 when at home in range of Fusion) from BT

or...

b) A quite nice 3G SonyEricsson K800i, with 500 mix/match minutes or SMS, for £18 a month over 18 months, on 3 UK . Which also comes with free IM, Skype calling (!) and an extra 300 on-net 3-to-3 minutes.

Unless I had absolutely shocking indoor coverage.... why on earth would I pick (a)? And if wasn't a BT Broadband subscriber, I wouldn't even have the choice. I'm not surprised that there hasn't been a recent update on subscriber numbers.

I wonder if BT is going to go the same way as Telecom Italia, and bin its UMA dual-mode service and wait around a bit longer for a SIP/IMS version as it gets 21CN up and running. Or maybe it will (finally) make some use of its low-power GSM spectrum license and do something fun with femtocells (there are some 2G femtos about....)

Comments

[rjr1972:]

... and the cause of this price differential? BT is trying to builld its proposition using unfavourable MVNO economics - forget about the bells and whistles indoors, BT is simply unable to create a compelling proposition AND subsidise the handset at these rates.

2007 Dec 19 02:00 AM