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To help that process (maybe), here are a handful of easy questions that all high level telco executives should be asking as they review the business cases to support the vision of charging for everything in an IMS world…
- Have we factored in the higher cost of the bigger and more complex billing systems required to do all this?
- Does our billing system budget include a sufficient allowances for systems implementation, integration and data migration, bearing in mind that all of these escalate disproportionately with complexity?
- Do we know how much more it will cost to run and support these new systems?
- Have we taken into account the dynamics of the technology so that we can compare the capabilities of the IMS network of, say five years hence, with the edge-technology alternatives five years hence, not just with the Internet of today?
- Do we have customer research that lets me know with reasonable certainty how many of my customers are prepared to pay extra for IMS-delivered services, and how much?
- Have we factored in information from our previous experience (and others’) that shows that the cost of handling customer enquiries and complaints increases with the complexity of the billing regime?
- Do we know through any objective research, which of our customer segments are most accepting of billing complexity, and how any of them are going to react negatively to our plans?
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"The case for investment is not simple, and what might be a smart investment for one service provider may not be the right path for another." |
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Needless to say, I’m not actually going to answer these questions myself, because the answer for each service provider will be different depending on their history, expertise, aspirations, and local economic environment. However I will make some general guesses as to how different groups of companies might respond.
My estimate of the climate just now is that, unless something unexpected happens, very large service providers with deep pockets, especially those that serve many large business customers, will somehow be able to answer ‘yes’ to most of those questions and are already on the road to position IMS-based networks and correspondingly complex billing and management systems as a central and dominant plank in their evolution strategy.
Some service providers, probably the smaller or the more consumer-oriented, will answer ‘no’ to a lot of these questions and so will eschew IMS entirely for the time being, unless there comes a point where they just don’t get to play meaningfully without getting aboard the IMS boat. In the middle ground, many will say “don’t know yet” and might defer a decision (or play in both games) until the future becomes a little clearer.
The case for investment is not simple, and what might be a smart investment for one service provider may not be the right path for another. I believe it is the case that the global market for communications connectivity and services is now big enough and varied enough that multiple approaches can coexist, and people can make money in different ways in a relatively free competitive market.
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