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maybe they would have become the suppliers of choice for common services such as billing, identity management, quality of service management, and security.
Now they will just be other players in the market place, because smart people at the edge of the network have found ways to do much of this without relying on the bit-carriers.
Take authentication and identity management for example. Just a few years ago, as the Internet was only starting on its path to reshape our personal and business lives, telcos had more information about connected customers than anyone else. They had long-term relationships with their customers, who trusted them, at least as much as they trusted any other big company. Back then, carriers were in a good position to step up and offer identity management and a single-sign on service to their customers and to the over-the-top companies. By registering one time with the access provider, we can easily envisage customers being able to access multiple content sites, pre-authenticated. One identity, multiple destinations.
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Now the gap is already being filled, without the help of the carriers. |
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be exploited to provide billing as a service for over-the-top companies. True. A few years ago, setting up on-line billing for products and services was a bit of a hassle, and there was certainly an opportunity for a service provider to step in. The carriers looked on while, in a very short time ISPs started to collaborate with third party service providers to provide merchant services – not just customer billing, but the whole process chain including shopping carts, credit card validation, order management, and more.
The TMF Management World presentation by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, illustrated just what carriers who think they can provide billing services for others have to do to catch up. Amazon is no longer simply a retailer of books and CDs. It is now a platform service provider for a vast range of third party on-line merchants selling content, services, and physical goods. Amazon not only looks after all
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But service providers didn’t think of it then. Actually, I’m fairly sure that some people in the service provider community did think of it, but anything that might encourage over-the-top service providers to grow and make money was maybe not flavor-of-the-year in those days. Now the gap is already being filled, without the help of the carriers. OpenID has gained enormous traction. Microsoft has moved to make LiveID work with OpenID. Just about anybody can become an identity service provider. The carriers themselves, far from entering this market as a service provider, look to others, such as Verisign, (probably the market leader today) to perform these services for them.
How about billing? Carriers have big, complex, highly capable billing systems that surely can
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the financial aspects of trading, it can warehouse and deliver the goods. Amazon’s platform has been designed to make it easy for others to sell online, safely and efficiently. Amazon learned quickly that working with others enables economies of scale, which is what every infrastructure-based service provider should aim for.
Furthermore, applications running on edge devices can trigger their own billing events and send charges across the network to any billing system anywhere. What can the carriers offer that will attract those transactions to telco billing systems in preference to credit card systems?
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