CTIA Wireless 2009 - After ... thoughts

Coming back from CTIA Wireless 2009 I felt beaten up in the struggle to bring forward good arguments for an intelligent services layer that could transform network operators from Carriers to Service Providers, give them the agility to apply the right business model for the right consumer, right on time. There was so much ebullience around 4G - on its way to making “mobile broadband similar to what fix broadband offering brings to the customer today” because Internet AppStores such as Apple’s, RIM’s and many others are there to generate more and more data traffic! Mobile data traffic will be doubling each year by Cisco's estimates, but network operators see it tripling, others even increasing 10 times! Nevertheless, a panel of 6 VP and above, executives from Sprint, Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, AT&T, T-Mobile and Orange labs, went completely blank when somebody asked the pertinent question: “then, as a smart device owner, whose customer am I anyway: Apple’s, Google’s or AT&T’s?” Neverminding the unanswered question, carriers have a new reason to be “busy bee building 4G, WiMaX or LTE” - btw, I learned from Clearwire’s CEO that it does not matter, “there is almost 80% compatibility”. Moreover, with so much data traffic that will be generated, there is yet another opportunity to develop new areas of network management: “policy control and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI)”! No doubts there are good reasons for this attitude. The complexity of the network, starting from the access point for broadband, increases tremendously! Think only about the fine granularity of phase synchronization that is needed to support high bandwidth wireless traffic or about the heterogeneity with which core network management has to deal due to so many vertical additions of services. And so many suppliers for all these pieces that need to come together somehow to deliver service to customer! Being able to manage this complexity called “network” is after all the pride of being a “Network Operator”! The trouble with this model and the above “broadband strategy” is that data traffic increases exponentially while revenue follows rather a logarithmic increase. Following this data "plot", time is limited until the model will become unsustainable because it will cost too much to operate the network for the amount and variety of data flows, even if the Network Carrier becomes a smart IP traffic cop and starts banishing the illegal (BitTorrent) and hurting the foe (Skype)! Only so much done for understanding what the customer wants and how much he is willing to pay or to give up, like time to watch an ad, to get that service! But if the new business models are not for network operators, what will happen then? Internet players do get them, these new business models, they need them, this is how they make money today! Will one of the big Internet players, say an AppStore owner, buy the mobile operator who runs out of money operating 4G networks because this hurts an application distribution channel? I don’t think so, no mobile operator has the global reach Internet players need and have! Nevertheless, there must be some sort of calculation that shows how to “subsidize” network operations, whoever carries their burden, to allow viral applications penetration anywhere, on any device so that everybody on the value chain/network survives. Maybe this is a version of the 2/multi-sided business models where the platform is the Device or the AppStore, not the network operator’s SDP as we all thought at the beginning of the NGN era. The network operator may be just a side that will be paid by the platform owner. And when the side is not worth it, it will be dropped for just another one. Do you see network operators competing to become the ‘preferred’ side for an AppStore so that AppStore reaches more subscribers? For me, sounds more like what is happening today. The optimistic twist now: to win in this competition network operators still need to build some form of a Service Delivery Framework so external partners can tap in without any knowledge of the network behind. The value provided in this model, be it just bit transport, must be exposed as a manageable service otherwise it will be hard to on-board it and make it a side of the real money making platform. And this could be the beginning of understanding of what we are all trying to preach here…

Paradigms and paroxysm

A network operator struggling with the increased traffic from content over its broadband access realizes that working at IP level or below it is unable to deliver the expected quality of service by customer or by application so is asking: do you think that the United States Postal Office can offer you to pay a monthly fee and then allow you to send any number of any letters or packages of any size or content? What do you think?

From triple-play to double-play when the OSS/BSS transformation is just a buzz word

Keith Willetts' last blog published also by Telecommunications Online Magazine is a realistic and hopefully motivating analysis of why Service Providers should continue with their operational transformation projects based on IT and creatively think forward on new generation of services.

I'm not just the broken trumpet here, I have facts in hand if you wanted to hear my story.

I have recently tried to install triple-play service in a new condo. It took 3 weeks, 4 technicians trips to my place and almost 10 calls to the call center. And all that I got was double-play for a higher price than the triple-play package I initially ordered.

All the answers as to why this excruciating experience that raises my blood pressure each time when I see the company's add for triple-play on TV, all the answers sit in the inefficiency and obsolesce of the operational processes, the same since the initial value proposition of the company, the cable TV.

One call I had with the Service Provider was specifically about this inefficiency in hope that somebody will hear me. This is when I found out out for example that the culprit is "the system"!
"The system" can not:
-track work orders unless there is one truck with one technician sent per apartment even though the intervention is on the same type and must happen at the same place!
- activate a new phone number in less than 4 days
- indicate that the signal is too low and the cable infrastructure is too old to install high speed Internet or triple play in some areas

Changing "the system" is what this OSS/BSS transformation is about. Redesigning obsolete workflows into agile business processes, rationalizing the myriad of management tools which confuse and separate organizations, putting location based services enabled PDAs in technicians hands and updating their skills to match those of datacenter technicians who beside driving a truck know how to draw cables, measure signals, plug them into boxes, have heard about IP and can even type a few encrypted commands to properly test the status of a computer or a program.

And if the skills part does not work, just surface all these service activation operations to a portal, the new generation of subscribers will know what to do with it.

Email incommunicado

Have you noticed how difficult and slow is communication via email these days?

Have spammers killed this dear channel or are we just bad receivers who try to improve our email processing efficiency with tools that are not wired for our communicative behaviors?

We want to be kept in the loop and be communicative by subscribing to lists and CC-ing entire organizations but then we kill the direct channel, the simple email addressed to us by somebody whom we know either because he/she uses a different email address or because the email has been placed in an unimportant folder by the inflexible rules where we can not code “but put it into my inbox if I am the only recipient and I know this person”.

Emailing drops from the list of communications means because the decoding at the receiving end is nolonger working on the information in the body but has been transformed in the business assistant scrutinizing the envelopes coming in for her boss based on her guess and unaware of marketing tricks. Whether I do not have the right email address, the catchy subject or the shortness in expression, there is a high chance my email will not be read and my message will not reach its destination.

Mail, telegram, email, instant messaging, phone, telepresence and transcendence … by abandoning email I need to move now up on the communication scale into options that are more and more intrusive and which may obsolete textual and graphical communication when these are the best means of expressing our thoughts in an objective, persistent, linguistically rich, and hard to repudiate way.

Is there value in saving the email channel or is it already dead business?