In a perfect world, unified communications would bring together two camps, the business and consumer end-user. For the business user, ideally they would like to have all the function of their desktop available on their mobile device. For the consumer, they want to get all of their messages from home on their phone, along with all the Web 2.0 functionality that they get on their home PCs, let alone cool stuff like presence.

The two groups have something in common. When they are on the phone, they want access to applications, and they also want reliable connectivity for a reasonable price without having their calls dropped, and this is where wish number five comes in. But let’s lay a little ground work first. Every serious vendor in the UC space is working on the mobility aspect of UC – making applications work on the device of choice, and it’s no small feat to accomplish that. However, beyond creating services, there is one group of vendors that is not pulling their weight – the carriers. Although many of them are not card carrying legacy vendors in this segment, they still seem to have the same attribute as the grandfathers in this space. That is slowness to change. My high school teacher one time said something I thought was brilliant and has stuck with me for years (ok, decades). He said “It takes 11 seconds for a whale to react after it’s been harpooned.” When I first started working in the telecom industry and I watched as the RBOCs were slow to adopt anything, I thought of this statement and smiled. When I think of the carriers and always on access to unified communications, I think of this statement and I want to scream. Wish number five is that the carriers get into the game in a big way and solve our access problems!

Have you ever flown overseas and not had your phone work? I’ve only gone to Canada (see next section) and that was bad enough. I’ve been assured by a real road warrior that because I’m a Cingular subscriber, that my life would be hell if I went to Europe, from a features and cost perspective. I’ll take his word for it. He claims that even if I went onto a Cingular partner’s network I’d lose all functionality except for dial-tone.

Then there is the issue of cost. For example, in Thomas Purves blog, entitled “Canada Worse than 3rd World Countries when it comes to Mobile Data Access”, he shows how Canadians get skewered when it comes to mobile data access. It would be funny if it weren’t so scary. I’m sure he is not the only one complaining about this.

If we are ever to have true unified communications the carriers will have to get more skin in the game and provide us with feature portability, guaranteed access, and provide it at a reasonable cost. Where is that harpoon when we need it?