become common, as will arbitrator gateways for transferring QoS contracts; so also the related SLA arbitration. Quad-play will become commonplace and lay a considerable burden on near-real-time management and the ramping to scale of that management. Settlement will become much more complex – often involving multi-party transactions with elaborate and obscure rules – making settlement a policy-driven application. [Just look up the distribution rules in DRM contracts in the media world to see just how elaborate this can get.]

Lastly, deep packet inspection leading to differential QoS treatment for differential charging will become the norm of all edge and gateway interconnection points. This, of course, will require great leaps in mediation services (aggregating billing transactions) and will increase the relative importance and value of very-high-rate mediation and aggregation billing components.

Lastly, customer service guarantees, given to end users, businesses, and upstream members of the logistics flow will require enhanced customer service. This will drive the advancement of new architectures and technologies in the Contact Center and require active, close integrations with OSS/BSS applications.

We think that Telco 2.0 is correct that the telecom ecosystem must move away from relying on the end user as the sole revenue source and towards a model of not just dual directional revenue, but indeed multidirectional revenue streams - and so also include the user as a resource and a partner as well as a customer. However, every business model needs to deliver value to all parties in order to be successful. Service providers have a long way to go to demonstrate that they deserve to be paid by both the supplier and the buyer for the same transaction.