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I like nothing more than to see and experience the latest and
greatest trends in the industry like 3DTV or the newest 4G handset. One
really interesting type of service we're starting to hear is about is a
space called "augmented reality," which is an inspired amalgamation of
capabilities you find on smartphones where you might point your camera
at something like the Empire State Building, and the GPS in your phone
knows where you are, searches through what you're likely looking at
through your camera lens and then offers you all kinds of results like
a Wikipedia entry on the historic building, information on tickets to
get to the top of the building or where's the nearest McDonald's. Cool
and not actually any breakthrough technology, just an inspired
orchestration of what is already there.
In a way, I think that's a lesson for CSPs facing a growing
disparity between the demands of the market for more bandwidth coupled
with its unwillingness to actually pay for it. One solution is to
endlessly search for new novel services to deliver, but another is to
do more of the same in new creative ways.
Some new services like IPTV are quietly becoming pretty successful
for some operators; others are working in partnership with different
suppliers in the value chain on areas like mobile money. Cloud services
may be another growth area, but all of these are very "network heavy"
services.
Contrast that with app stores, content and advertising where CSPs
seem to be losing momentum compared to the "over the top" players, and
the old Michael Porter dictum of sticking to your core competencies
starts to show through. So other network-based services like hi-fi
voice are an obvious play even if they are unlikely to drive much in
the way of new revenues, but they will go a long way to keeping
existing customers happy. Another interesting area in new services based on "old" stuff has to
do with "smart" utilities such as smart electricity, gas and water
grids. For example, Vodafone has recently won a contract in the UK to
supply – at least initially – about 1 million SIM cards to deliver
wireless connectivity for smart electricity meters. This is the first
wave to replace all electricity and gas meters in the UK with smart
meters. That's right; they've run out of people to sell mobile phones
to, so they've started giving them out to inanimate objects! (By the
way, that's why the fax machine got invented!)
All kidding aside, with 25 million households in the UK and many
more in the U.S. and other countries experiencing so-called
"saturation" of mobile markets, that's a lot of potential new network
users reutilizing and repurposing existing technologies and investment.
None of these are the "killer app," but then I don't think there is
a killer app out there — I think its lots and lots of new angles on
fairly ordinary infrastructure, just done better, smarter and cheaper.
And rather than being traditional telecom services, where the provider
buys it, installs it, activates it and then charges and bills for it,
the new wave of communications services generally involve partnerships
and a lot of things — money, orders and more — flowing among parties in
the value chain. And then of course we have the whole management issue
as well.
That's why TM Forum has created its Enabling New Services initiative
to get a handle on this B2B trading environment and take a close look
at what appropriate standards are needed here. This isn't our first
outing in this space by a long shot; we've been working on service
delivery platforms, value chains and other components, albeit in a more
isolated manner.
Now we're looking to bring it all together into a more structured
environment to help our members address all of the issues that come up
with new services that involve a lot of piece parts and, in some cases,
a lot of different partners.
CSPs know they are so far from the days when voice was king and
nothing stood between them and their customers. And unless they adapt
to today's world of new services, they'll really lose out on a lot of
potential business and may never be able to catch up again. According to Keith Willets- chairman and CEO of TM Forum www.telecomasia.net
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