BT Fusion was a telecommunications product available from

BT Group BT Group plc (formerly British Telecom) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered in London, England. It has operations in around 180 countries and is the largest provider of fixed-li ...

in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

until 1 April 2009 when it was withdrawn."BT 'BluePhone' Fusion is better than Skype because...?"
The Register, 15 June 2005 It "fused" together

mobile telephony Mobile telephony is the provision of wireless telephone services to mobile phones, distinguishing it from fixed-location telephony provided via landline phones. Traditionally, telephony specifically refers to voice communication, though th ...

and, from the user's point of view, conventional

landline A landline is a physical telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber from the subscriber's premises to the network, allowing multiple phones to operate simultaneously on the same phone number. It is also referred to as plain old ...

telephony Telephony ( ) is the field of technology involving the development, application, and deployment of telecommunications services for the purpose of electronic transmission of voice, fax, or data, between distant parties. The history of telephony is ...

. In fact, the fixed portion of the link was provided by a

Voice over IP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

implementation using the domestic

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over Copper wire, copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem ...

service. The BT Fusion service was compatible with the BT Smart Hub. The premise of the service was that it could reduce mobile phone costs by not using the mobile network when the user is at home. The same phone was used (a modified version of the Motorola RAZR or Motorola V560), but if the phone was within range of a special base station installed in the user's home or office then incoming and outgoing calls will be routed through that base station instead of the mobile network. This link between the phone and base station was carried over

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

(BT Fusion was latterly available using Wifi technology, thus allowing discounts not only at home but over BT Openzone WiFi hotspots). BT Fusion was an example of one type of telecommunication convergence. From the base station, at-home calls were connected to the phone network using an

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

connection; only those with BT Broadband connections were eligible for the service. Voice over IP protocols were used to transmit the call, but this was intended to remain largely unnoticed from the user's point of view. In particular, the charges for calls made over the "home" part of a BT Fusion system were essentially the same as landline call charges. Some commentators criticised the service as expensive and a "solution in search of a problem". In particular, they pointed to free or cheaper-than-landline IP phone systems like

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

References

External links

BT site
*
"BT 'BluePhone' Fusion is better than Skype because...?"
', The Register, 15 June 2005 {{BT Group BT Group VoIP services VoIP hardware Fixed mobile convergence