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Rebecca Prudhomme, Director Product & Solutions Marketing for Amdocs Interactive, agrees that voice is hardly the cash cow it used to be. “It’s a common known industry fact that voice revenue is declining and that SPs must continue to carve out a position in the value chain that spans beyond voice,” said Prudhomme. “They must be able to sell, provision, and bill for new bundles of digital apps, physical goods and phone service plans across any channel.”
Alternatives:
So, what fate awaits the CSPs? Are they destined to become empty, brainless pipelines for external content? “Alcatel-Lucent does not believe that telcos and cablecos are necessarily destined to only become ‘bitpipes’,” said Johanne Mayer, Director of Communication, Systems and Applications Integration at Alcatel-Lucent. “We believe that CSPs can leverage their network asset and work with third parties to create new and innovative services to offer to their end users.”
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“We believe that CSPs can leverage their network asset and work with third parties to create new and innovative services to offer to their end users.” |
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solutions. “They’re operating in an increasingly augmented and varied environment. What is important in that environment is service agility.”
Zabawskyj provides an example of a service provider striking a deal with an external provider like Amazon for the ability to “change the bitpipe on the fly,” creating the ability for end users to have modified bandwidth experiences in exchange for special consideration from Amazon.
Likewise, Zabawskyj mentions the example of mobile operators being able to see if their customers are attempting to engage in high-bandwidth activities, like viewing streaming online video. A provider with the
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Mayer points to norms that are being put into place in Singapore and New Zealand, and elsewhere, in which the government has created an open access wholesale services. “These wholesale services will be sold by a NetCo to network service providers (NSPs), also called Operator Companies (OpCos),” said Mayer, “who will use them as a building block for providing retail services to end-users.” NetCos provide no end services, but, rather, to the network and local backhaul. “In that scenario, we believe that the NetCo can be a profitable “bitpipe” operator as it can focus on building a high leverage agile IP based network with complete B2B automation with the Operators Companies,” said Mayer.
“Operators today are facing a business reality,” said Bohdan Zabawskyj, CTO of Redknee, a vendor of real-time converged billing, customer care and unified rating & charging
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right degree of awareness and the charging know-how could contact the end user and offer a one-time bandwidth upgrade for a small fee.
Openet’s Downey also sees the current model as less-than-effective at providing the needs of the modern consumer and the modern provider, alike. “Today, the reality is that most operators would be happy to just stop retailing a bitpipe,” he said. “Current data access business models frequently fail to align user behavior with the costs of this behavior. For example, flat-rate plans have seen the cost-per-bit served rising while limiting the scope for increasing the revenue per bit.”
End-user expectations in areas in which bandwidth has been relatively cheap for years and charging models erred toward the “all you
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