U.S. start-up aims to join telephone and wireless calls

Reuters reports on a new start-up that is trying to bridge "the gulf between mobile telephones and fixed-line phone networks." Silicon Valley-based Stoke Inc. are developing a way to offer "fixed mobile convergence." The start-up joins an ever growing field of players "trying to solve the question of how to hook up mobile phone networks to fixed-line phone or cable networks to give phone users a single point of contact."

Craig Mathias at Farpoint Group said, "There is a lot of debate right now about who will have the right approach. Stoke has a very comprehensive architecture."

Ken Dulaney at Gartner said, "That whole area is really problematic until we get standards. There are lots of political problems here." Dulaney noted that the "still ill-defined area of fixed wireless convergence may suffer from the same fragmentation that has delayed the spread of location-based mobile phone services because each carrier has built separate systems."

He added, "It is going to take a Herculean marketing effort to realise the vision of fixed mobile convergence."