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billing for these services. They can get this off the ground quite quickly by going for simplicity and standardization in service design, by deploying very simple pricing structures, and offering modest (or no) service quality guarantees. It might not be sophisticated, but it could work.
Eventually, the most successful open source products could trickle into the big incumbents, for niche applications. That would be interesting.
In Practice:
The traditional phone companies may dominate the telecom industry but they do not own it. It may be that ultimately core transport will be owned by a relatively small number of giant companies – infrastructure cost providing a high barrier to entry. The multiplicity of access technologies may permit more companies to compete in the access space. Access is all very well – it’s a prerequisite, just like highways are necessary before people buy cars. But … applications will be open to all-comers, and here, open source software has the potential to reduce the barrier to entry to a small bump in the road, easily negotiated by anyone with a server or two.
Applications – voice and video communications, messaging, content delivery services – are what make people spend those
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Applications – voice and video communications, messaging, content delivery services – are what make people spend those extra dollars. |
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extra dollars. And these are the areas in which new service providers will proliferate. Here, open source software has the ability to lower the entry barrier while still providing effective, cheap and cheerful functionality.
The bottom line may well be that while large telcos will not widely embrace open source OSS/BSS applications in the near term, smaller incumbents and the new generation of OTT service providers will. For everyone, selected open source applications could potentially help control costs and drive new services revenues, in a niche role within incumbents and in a more widespread way in new competitive service providers. It follows that smart people in telcos are already looking seriously at how open source will play out in this environment. I have been discussing this topic with a few telco decision-makers and their strategy advisors, and plan to cover their perspectives in more detail in a follow-up article.
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