VentureBeat

FusionOne is announcing this morning that it has snared Canadian cell phone carrier Telus as a customer for its mobile phone backup and restore service.

San Jose, Calif.-based FusionOne has been around for a decade as a provider of software that backs up the contact data, camera phone pictures and stored applications on a cell phone. If someone loses a phone or switches providers, FusionOne’s software can restore it as needed.

Canada-based Telus will offer its Telus Mobile Backup (powered by FusionOne) service for two Canadian dollars a month. Telus joins Verizon Wireless as a major customer for the FusionOne service. That’s one more customer on the path toward providing the ultimate service for consumers — complete portability of all of the data on their cell phones, which would let users move from one provider to another painlessly.

So far, more than 800 million mobile phone contacts are backed up with FusionOne software on a variety of carriers. Telus has six million cell phone subscribers. FusionOne was founded in 1998, with headquarters in San Jose and engineering in Tallinn, Estonia.

I’m still waiting for the day when FusionOne can really break free. Carriers aren’t fully exploiting FusionOne’s technology, which theoretically could be used to enable subscribers to move all of their data from one cell phone carrier to another. For instance, when Verizon Wireless opens up its network soon, users will want to dial into its network with different phones from different cell phone carriers. They may want to upgrade phones, moving their contacts, licensed applications, music, ringtones, calendars, and camera phone photos from the phone on one carrier to a phone on another carrier.

There is nothing blocking the carriers from being able to use FusionOne to do cross-platform transfers. But so far, no carriers are doing it. That’s part of the “walled garden” thinking that many carriers are clinging to, even as pressure comes to open up.

Mohan Sadashiva, FusionOne’s senior vice president of marketing, said carriers are taking small steps toward opening their networks. But additional change may be forced by legislation, much like when carriers were forced by new laws to provide number portability, and consumers won the right to take their phone numbers with them from one service provider to another.

Japan is considering legislation to enable mobile content portability, or the right to move your data — contacts, pictures, apps — from one cell phone provider to another. In the U.S., such legislation could happen as well. Sadashiva sees it as inevitable. FusionOne may have a big pay day when that happens.

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Tags: co:FusionOne