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expect the big carriers to do, first and foremost. (They’re entitled to do all sorts of other things in their spare time, but please deliver the bits first. Thanks.) And frankly, this is still what carriers do supremely well. The more you know about how it’s all done, the more amazing it seems. But of course most customers are long past being amazed; they just want it to happen. They don’t want to know about the challenges of reliability, security, capacity, and prioritization, they just want it to work.
The people who use the converged services platform of the Internet, however, are demanding people; they don’t want to sit in one seat all day, using a single device. They travel on business. They go on vacation. They visit friends and have parties. They work in an office, at home, in other people’s offices, in restaurants, bars, and cafes. People move house more than they used to. People sometimes want to use a laptop, then a desktop, then a smartphone and they expect the services and content they left behind on one device to be there for them when they decide to use a different one.
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Most customers are long past being amazed; they just want it to happen. |
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agnostic access, they don’t want to pay more than they need. No service provider yet offers sensibly-priced multi-device access everywhere. So people consistently do business with multiple access providers both to achieve the coverage they need and to save significant dollars.
What the customers seem to be looking for is some kind of converged access platform to go with the converged service platform of the Internet. The converged access platform would be ubiquitous and device agnostic. It would also be cost-converged, meaning that it shouldn’t cost me much more to send and receive my bits when I’m on the road than it does when I’m back home. And it shouldn’t cost me a heap more than it costs the person on the phone or laptop sitting right next to me, on the train, or hotel lobby, or coffee shop.
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Today, there is no easy and economical way of doing all this without dealing with multiple access service providers. There is, of course, the simple issue of geographical coverage: no access service provider is physically everywhere. Then you may need a different access service provider for each device, depending on the access technologies you use – your wired desktop, your wireless (3G) smartphone, your wireless (WiFi or WiMax) laptop. I find that I pay dollars, one way or another, to six access providers so I can exchange data with the Internet wherever I am, using the device of my choice.
Perhaps people don’t really need to do business with quite so many service providers, but it turns out that we can save money by spreading the business around.
While customers have demonstrated that they are happy to pay for ubiquitous device-
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There are no real technology barriers to achieving this level of access convergence. The obstacles are to do with last-generation business models, and levels of revenue protection that will last until they are disrupted. One way of achieving converged access is for access providers to collaborate on new generation fixed and wireless roaming and reciprocal access paradigms that share revenues reasonably equitably across carriers. Clearly there is not much incentive for this to happen. Why should access providers work hard to build a new model where the main result would be perceived to be lower gross revenues for the industry? Only if they could be confident that people would increase their use of the world’s networks enough to make up the difference, and no one seems ready quite yet to start out on that apparently risky road.
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