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will help in bringing existing communities and standards emerging from SIP/IMS and OMA. However, beyond RCS, operators realize the need to address the role that social media plays. The industry understands that this will require the building of technical interfaces between operator networks and Web 2.0 sites.
The RCS initiative and the call to action for integration with Web 2.0 will result in the complete evolution of the telecom market, where different types of players fight for wider-ranging value propositions. To succeed, operators will require the ability to smartly charge any service or content across any network or device regardless of payment type. In addition to bandwidth management flexibility, this will require more agility in service creation and provisioning.
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Carriers need to understand in real-time who is using which services and applications. |
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services, regardless of location, access point, and payment type. Requirements include:
Real Time Policy Management - Billing offers need to be tied to real time policy enforcement in the network
Real Time Charging Rules - To extract value from the network, the billing system needs to tell the network how to charge the customer’s service regardless of account type, payment type, or device
Service(s) Provisioning - Service providers need a single provisioning point to ensure faster service roll out
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Critical Success Factors
To support these new converged and high-bandwidth services, Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) coupled with IMS will play a key role. LTE is the reference architecture from 3GPP to support new high bandwidth services, providing greater bandwidth to the end-user as well as more efficient management of data traffic and faster service provisioning for operators. On the basis of existing mobile data growth rates, operator OPEX could increase exponentially if LTE networks are not in place to support the evolving market expectations.
With all this focus on the network, operators must not forget about the back office implications of delivering and monetizing these new services. To address these new challenges, BSS needs to play a critical role in operators’ convergent infrastructure strategies. It’s no longer just about the network; what's called for now is a single system that can intelligently accept an order, provision, rate, and charge all
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Real-time Unified View of the Customer - A real-time view of customers’ accounts (profile, usage, status) across all services will enable personalization and consistent customer management
Smart Charging - Flexible charging for any service or service combination, content, and any payment type whether prepaid, postpaid, or hybrid
An inability to smartly charge for converged services typically relegates an operator to proceed with the flat-rate business model, which adversely results in lost revenue. According to a recent Yankee Group report, 57% of operators (based on a worldwide survey) believe that the flat-rate business model is not sustainable for broadband value based services. (Banerjee, A. & Vorhaus, D. [January 2009]. Yankee Group. Thinking Beyond Flat-Rate and Stovepiped Business Models)
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