Ultimately, big expensive solutions with centralized control of service, data, presence, and connectivity are going to be under extreme competitive pressure from simpler distributed technologies. The industry may be fighting this trend, but it is a battle that can only be won in the short term. The war may very well go to distributed Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] technology.

Lots of questions remain. For example: how will game systems evolving to home control and access points play into this? Will emerging service uses for phone, like authenticating purchases or displaying a virtual ticket drive FMC or just mobile conversion from landline?

Requirements for OSS & BSS

Since it is not yet clear yet how FMC will evolve, it is hard to pin down how it will be managed. Even without knowing the details, it is clear that the FMC network and the advanced services which it enables will be very complex to manage. Detailed billing will be extremely complex to represent in a statement. Perhaps even more challenging will be billing between the service providers and the content providers – thousands of content providers. Handling disputes about quality of services delivered and breaches of the underlying service level agreements with each content provider could add thousands of dollars to the cost per customer account. Then add in the requirements to offer and manage things like parental control; allocation of budget per service; and transfers of budget allocations between members of a family or group – in real time. We are just beginning to see where all of the short comings are in our current OSS/BSS capabilities.

“One of the major steps that operators owning separate fixed and mobile divisions have begun is to merge the two divisions at several layers: technology strategy, corporate strategy, back-office functions, customer care and billing, and sales and marketing. Integrated operators have an advantage in owning both fixed and mobile infrastructure, but also face an enormous challenge if those divisions have been managed separately with different financial targets and working methods.” [IDC, CG29M] So to, these divisions have completely different OSS/BSS infrastructures and Operations departments. They use very different process with wildly different service delivery time expectations. A new home owner cannot walk out of a store with a house phone and expect it to be operational on a network by the time they arrive home to plug it in… but this happens thousands of times a day with mobile operators.