TECHNOLOGY
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Michael Cooney
Associate Vice President of Product Management

Michael Cooney is associate vice president of product management with Kineto Wireless, overseeing the company's infrastructure product lines. He has 15 years of engineering, strategy, business development, marketing and product management experience in the telecommunications industry. Previously, Mr. Cooney was responsible for product management at Tropos Networks, a municipal wireless startup. Prior to this, Mr. Cooney spent nine years with Tellabs/AFC, most recently as the senior director of product line management and planning for the company's $600M wire line access division. view full bio
Evolution of UMA
Is UMA a short term, or transitional technology or does it have a long future? UMA is certainly not a short-term technology. 'Short term' implies that UMA is a stop-gap technology, filling a need until something better comes along. Yet there is no better technology approach for delivering mobile/Wi-Fi convergence or a dual-mode handset service. Clearly VCC, even when the standard is completed, will fall far short of UMA for user experience, ease of deployment, and overall total cost.

Meanwhile, the drivers for operators to deploy dual-mode handsets, to accelerate fixed-mobile substitution, and to address the threat from alternative VoIP providers, remain strong.

Even when the RAN can support mobile VoIP and IMS telephony, operators will still demand a technology to provide seamless mobility for dual-mode phones. UMA, which provides seamless mobility for packet services today, will continue to meet the need well into the future.
So, what is the lifetime of UMA technology?
It is always hard to predict the "lifetime" of a technology. For example, with the rise of 3G, EDGE was considered to be dead, but it continues to thrive because it meets a fundamental business need.

The fundamental principles driving UMA deployment are still in place and remain quite strong. A number of leading mobile operators have deployed UMA service and invested money solidifying their commitment to it. The number of vendors offering UMA-interoperable services, is growing steadily and the marketplace is demanding more handsets. At Kineto, we remain confident in the technology's potential and the benefits it brings to the operators and consumers.
How is the UMA standard evolving?
The UMA standard continues to evolve in the 3GPP GERAN meetings as any transport specific evolves. New features and functionality are added as required. Currently the GERAN is adding support for Iu mode interfaces from the UNC into the core network.