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Ask anyone who suffers from severe acrophobia: The edge is a complicated place.

The ledge of a building. The rim of a cliff. The outermost edge of a tower. These are beautiful and potentially terrifying locations, whether literal or metaphorical.

The edge of reason. The edge of darkness. The edge of the world.

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Business consolidations continued during the last month as OSS/BSS providers and telecommunications firms sought to provide new, engaging solutions for customers. New offerings are needed, particularly in mobile communications, as market penetration nears 90 percent.

Redknee, a provider of billing and charging software and solutions for communications service providers, closed its previously announced acquisition of Nimbus Systems, a privately held company that specializes in next generation billing, content settlement and customer care. The acquisition increased Redknee’s presence in Tier 1 group operators. The company expects new business from the full integration of Nimbus Systems’ solutions into Redknee’s product portfolio.

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It is easy to say that it has not been a very good month for Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian manufacturer of popular BlackBerry mobile devices. First, RIM's first ever touch-screen phone with BlackBerry's newest OS update, the BlackBerry Torch, debuts to middling reviews. Then, numbers released by research firm NPD show Android phones ahead in market share for the first time. But the most glaring problem, and the one that may seal BlackBerry's fate, is the growing unrest in the Middle East aimed at BlackBerry.

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Oh, what a journey it has been for VoIP. There was a time, not all that long ago, that VoIP was considered by many to be a novelty. Then it grew into a low-cost, over-the-top option with reliability issues, before becoming more and more ready for primetime. It became fully disruptive when cablecos and the aforementioned over-the-top plays began to use it to chip away at voice market-share, and now it has reached the sort of maturity that didn’t seem feasible in the past.

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The edge of the access network at one time simply involved reaching an end customer with a copper pair or a coax cable. Access equipment then became a little more complicated being through a DSLAM, CMTS, or other inside plant technologies, but the intelligence and complexity effectively remained in the service provider premises. Reaching a customer and managing the end-user experience was still achieved through management of simple termination points, and service guarantees were achieved through the inherent connectivity of the network.

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Mobile operators have been anticipating (and investing in, and standardizing upon) mobile data services for more than a decade. A huge hype cycle at the end of the 90’s about the “Internet in your pocket,” (and associated ARPU) ultimately fell flat. Devices available at that time offered a tiny text-based interface and staggeringly slow connectivity to precious little meaningful content. Operators had made massive infrastructure investments supporting mobile data services that nobody used. What was widely touted as a revolution on par with the Internet itself would have to wait.

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Imagine the following scenario: Your company sells roads; yes, roads for vehicles to drive on. What kind of vehicles? Any kind! From family cars, mini cars, motorcycles, and bicycles to medium size-family cars, couples cars, and youth cars to large cars, MPVs, SUVs, jeeps and four-wheel drives.

And last but not least, extra large cars – trucks, semitrailers, and even larger than that.

Your job in this company? You have to make sure it all runs smoothly and safely on the road, and that all drivers pay the toll on time and no drivers get a free pass. .

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“The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

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