Challenges before New BT CEO

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2967201,flstry-1.cms

The article outlines some of the challenges that BT’s new CEO Mr. Ian Livingston faces as he takes on the reins from Mr. Ben Verwaayen. Some of the major points noted are:

- top line growth – how to increase top line growth of a “fixed only business”
- customer & services – evolve portfolio to suit its customers, not technology e.g., younger generation are compulsive communicators that uses direct (voice, email, IM) and indirect (social networking sites, on-line message boards, second-life etc). This kind of service is also required for new workers who enter college to workplace
- marketing – “central to achieve greater understanding of customer needs is marketing” – brand association with communication services
- networks and technology – whether spending billions of dollar for 21CN project and whether it is in the right direction
- strategy & structure – strategy of BT has been to defend traditional services, grow new wave and transform the business through 21CN and IT) – does it require any modification to see terms like customers, services and customer services. Also give equal importance for investing in people along with system & processes.

My observations:
- Fixed only business of BT – this would be a challenge for any of the fixed line operators. With declining trend in usage of the fixed line telephony it would be challenge for any fixed line operator to improve the top-line. However I guess new services like IPTV, content access over broadband, prepaid broadband service etc, should help BT to improve their top-line. But unless these service differentiates from the existing competiting services, how can they become popular? Looks like BT also ventured into mobile TV but not sure whether it became profitable
- Strategy for a company would have formed based on the feedback from what customers want. So is it necessary to have customer specific targets in the strategy or the technology that enables such a transformation?

Airtel – Rural Service Initiative

Following is an interesting model that Airtel has come out with. I guess the SIM card given out under this scheme would have an on device portal (SIMTK) customized to provide the services specific to farmers and even the tariff associated with these cards will be special… I wonder what kind of services would be there in “exclusive service platform” meant for farming community (apart from information/alert services on weather, food price, govt policies etc and m-payment)… With rural penetration being focus for in next 2~3 years, all the operators would be interested in this initiative…

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IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd (IKSL), a fully owned subsidiary of IFFCO, and telecom service provider Airtel will jointly launch mobile marketing services across Tamil Nadu before September.

The services include selling premier brand handsets at concessional prices, issuance of dedicated sim cards under the caption IFFCO Airtel Green Card , which envisaged voice messages on agro-development inputs in vernacular media, A Jinnah, State Manager, IKSL, told reporters.

It also attract two-year warranty service for the handsets, fully backed up after sales service for the farming community, elaboration of the connectivity network by installing adequate number of towers in remote villages by Airtel.

He said that already districts of Villupuram, Erode, Cuddalore and Salem have been covered and the remaining districts would be covered before September-end.

“It is a nation wide venture by IFFCO and Airtel by creating an exclusive service platform meant for farming community. Already people in 14 states enjoy the services,” Jinnah said.

The joint venture of the fertiliser major and the mobile service provider envisaged a growth of 20 per cent year over year and with this trend it was hopeful that about 150 million customers would be enlisted by the year 2010-2011, Jinnah said.

IKSL through Primary Agriculture Cooperative Banks (PACB), will cover Tamil Nadu. With the introduction of the scheme in five districts in Tamil Nadu, already 1,000 PACBs have been covered in the network. In the second phase, the scheme would be extended to 2,000 PACBs, he said.

Currently models ranging from Rs 1,500-4,000 by Alcatel, Samsung and Philips were sold under the scheme. The scheme included informative inputs meant for agriculture,horticulture and animal husbandry activities for rural folks through SMS.

Key Attributes in a Service Delivery Platform

Key attributes to be managed in the network which will be accessed by different services…
- Presence
- Identity
- Authorization
- Location
- Device capability
- Per application QoS
- Per subscriber QoS
- Security
- Service brokering

In order to use these attributes in a service delivery platform, the infrastructure should be:

- Application aware & Support service differentiation
- Deliver targetted service for subscriber based on usage pattern
- Faster & low cost application creation technology platform
- Integration of the open source platform

Need for Service Delivery Transformation

http://www.lightreading.com/servsoftware/details.asp?sku_id=2162&skuitem_itemid=1082

Two strands for the telecom transformation – business transformation – identification of new business models and making money and other is the infrastructure transformation which involves making changes to the network and IT infrastructure so that it is ready to support new business models. I guess identification of such new business models and identifying changes in the infrastructure would both drive the existing operator for the transformation whereas for the greenfield operator it is the identification of business model that would drive the decision for the infrastructure selection.

However the whole transformation started with development of the all-IP networks that brought out new service providers who were part of the Internet. This forced the telecom operators to sit-up and take a look at emulating the Internet business model  (i.e., a business model in which a network of different actors and their resources are linked together by the internet technology) to get share of revenue from IP services value chain. Now let me dissect the meaning of “Internet business model” for telecom service provider.

Business model is the product/services offered to creat revenue and hence value to the share holders. Now while doing so it should be cost effective and should provide differentiation with the competitors. Now for the telecom service providers, providing plain voice services is not the product/service. It should be providing always-on kind of link to connect with their work, friends & faimily, entertainment. Now how does this generate revenue; may be by becoming a trusted party who manages all the service providers providing different kind of service, providing a unified platform for storing their information, unified identity platform and offer flexibility for making payment. Since end user is getting the flexibility of anytime, anywhere access of these services, and is independent of devices, operator would have to collect for this service from the end user. To become cost effective, the service creation has to be flexible, get developed from internal/external developers to reduce cost of creation of service. To create competitive advantage, the service assurance and making the service available on any device from anywhere could be critical. Also close tracking of the consumer behavior and doing a targetted advertisement and upsaling of the other services could bring additional revenue. To handle the multiple service providers, have the business platform to support the required workflow and the charging – modification in the eTOM framework adopted?

For the service creation unified subscriber data view and service data view is essential where different services will have to be orchestrated to provide service to the end user. Since operator own the subscriber, orchestrating the service will become a critical service in their offering. In terms of services it should be able to offer independent of the access and things like voice call continuity and data call continuity between the access should become a reality. For voice operator can themselves offer the voice (with committed QoS) but also should allow other providers like Skype to offer the service.

Revenue model in this new world will have to be built around the affliate marketing model. In this model, a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought about the affiliate’s marketing effort. But in the case of operator, this can be because customer using the service say from Google when compared to Microsoft. This model could also include the advertising to bring business for the other service providers operating using Internet. In this model operator can have a single web page which aggregates all other service provider. Then may be based on the content accessed (including Voice), it can be charged or a flat fee.

On the infrastructure side, since for each of the service providers the quality of service is delivered, the network infrastructure should be aware of the services (e.g., it should be able to give differential treatment based on the port, service type, URL etc).

Mobile Marketing Platform based on Near Real time Content

http://www.indiaprwire.com/pressrelease/telecommunications/
200804178845.htm

An interesting service where TELiBrahma has partnered with Sportingmindz to provide audience in a stadium to receive real time match linked information on their mobile handsets through Bluetooth. Sportingmindz provides the analytical content necessary for this service. Here is the flow of service:

1. Mobile subscriber enters stadium & activates Bluetooth (not sure whether there is any specific application needed in the handset)
2. Subscriber start receiving information like welcome kit (forecast of the match, pitch report, team composition, history of previous matches), video clips (wicket, best shot, crowd), trivia and updates (bowler pitch mark, partnership.scoring patterns) at every turn of the event at the match
3. Contest inside the match – player of the team, best dressed spectator, moment of the match etc

Right now the content is exclusive to Royal challengers and hence it is aimed at building the mobile fan club. Ultimately it is the brands that would like to ride on the content sent to the subscribers as this throws open a huge opportunity for advertising opportunity at the stadium.

However I do believe this has a potential to grow outside the stadium as well by sending information through SMS, MMS, WAP (even IVR to listen to quick match update). However with do-not-call kind of service becoming norm, it is essential to have an opt-in mechanism for the end users.On the other hand, can also have agreement with different telecom service providers to share the subscriber profile information (but will operator’s share such information?)

IPTV BOM – Hanasystec’s Solution

http://www.hanasystec.com/html_h/board/data/iptv%20system-by%20hana%20systec%20co.,ltd.pdf

Following is a typical bill of material for IPTV service (20K subs with 4K simultaneous sessions). Here the IMCS (Integrated management control system) or middleware takes care of the total IPTV control and provisioning. Also provides the CRM interfaces. But SMS (subscriber management system) and  SAS (Subscriber Authentication server) would also be part of middleware, no? If the broadcasting center and data centers can be clearly differentiated as follows, then it will throuh-up lot of possiblity for mix and match in the IPTV industry i.e., if one plays offer to connect their streaming distribution servers on multiple network operator’s network, then multiple broadcast centers would be able to provide services to subscribers residing on different networks. So essentially again the network operators would become bit pipe providers.

 

Encoder (H264 (MPEG 4 part 10) or MPEG-2) feeds the digital content to the streamer that can stream the video/audio onto the network. Now this streamer should be able to stream onto the wireless or on the wireline infrastructure. The way it should be streamed on wireless would be definetly will have to take care of the bandwidth limitation and the latency. But before the content enters the encoder it might have received either from live feed receiver or from stored video/audio content. The ad insertion would have to be done in either of these content sources.

Typical dimensioning requirements are:

- Total number of IPTV subscribers – gives  the license required for the middleware
- Support X number of live TV channels
- x% of VOD subscribers in total subscribers
- VOD server requirements – x number of concurrent streams, total storage for x hours
- CA/DRM – number of subscribers and how many channel scrambler
- How many E.264 encoders (1:1 ratio with channels + redundancy), IP streamers
- Whether the access network supports the required bandwidth

Service Broker – Necessary component in SDP

http://www.stratus.com/download/index.cfm/pdf/telecom/CSB-white-paper.pdf

Subscriber expectation – have multiple services and multiple devices, so they expect to access any services & content from anywhere on any device. So having IP backbone is essential to achieve such a need. So it is essential to have converged routing, messaging, content and centralized subscriber profile information. This is nothing but having a unified service delivery platform catering to different networks. In this service delivery platform, Stratus network is focusing on creating a service broker which can mediate in a multi service, multi access and multi network environment.

Stratus service broker consists of two part. One is the signaling gateway that converts and handles different protocols and the other is a mobile call converge device which takes care of handling call and call handover  between different networks (like WiFi, Celluar, TDM etc); also it handles service interactions by connecting to external subscriber database lookup. Below is the architecture of this service broker.

 

Now this service broker would also provide an IDE to create relationship between the services and create service rules (in the same lines as business rule creation in an SOA environment). Service rules thus created will have to have a service rule execution environment similar to SLEE. But now will be the interaction between such a service rule engine and an independent service execution environment be handled? i.e., if there is already established legacy IN services and SIP application server, can the service rule engine work with this service broker. It is possible to achieve this only if the service broker can sit between the core network elements and the application servers (which is already proposed as SCIM in IMS architecture). But with all network service traffic hitting the service broker, it is essential for the service broker to make some kind of distiction whether the service requested by the end user is a straight forward one or has some interaction. So the transaction processing capability of service broker will have to be really good and should not introduce any additional delays. On the other hand, such service brokers would really help in avoiding the interoperability issues as it can have agreement with NEPs to support their proprietary protocols (INAP/CAP/SIP) and on the AS side it can publish its own protocol or can work as proxy/protocol coverter based on the actual need. Following is the architecture of the Stratus service broker solution.

 

SINAP – Stratus integrated network application platform
C-SLEE – converged SLEE

Interesting point to note here is the Stratus T series hardware. I wonder whether it an ATCA blade server built by Stratus. Overall I think this is a necessary component in the overall service delivery platform of an operator who is in the path of evolution to an IMS based network. And for the greenfield operators, this element could help them to explore the possiblity of using a shared application server either from an existing operator or use a hosted application server from the vendor.