RCS-e/joyn is not just only for mobile carriers.

From time to time we are being asked about if RCS-e/joyn is a technology only for mobile telcos. Our answer is a big NO.
Although RCS-e/joyn is a technology pushed and promoted by the GSMA whose full members are mobile carriers, we see RCS as an new standard IP messaging that could be used ubiquitously with the advantages of the interoperation and federation.
Solaiemes strongly believes in the potential of RCS for triple play telcos, as they can offer a common and global reach messaging experience (hope in the next future joyn we adopted by most of the carriers) in all devices/screens under different types of connectivity.
We believe in the power of the REST RCS Network API to offer RCS-e web and connected TV [soon new video-demo, be patient :-) ] clients.
DSL, Fix & Cable operators can provide then "a new communication service", a personal communication service in the same way they offered in the past a complementary or low fee email account. In the case of the TV, it offers huge possibilities of having the biggest screen of your home to receive pics from family and friends and see them directly there. Also to see incoming videosharing from mobile. Why not have your family on the couch watching TV and being prompted by you streaming live video while hiking when the summit gets closer?
Communications are about sharing experiences, and innovation can be delivered by all actors in the communication space.
It is very easy to integrate the RCS capabilities in softphones provided by fix carriers, or set-top-boxes by cable operators. Also, it you can deliver RCS as web or TV Widget easily. No reason for non mobile telcos to think that they have little choice to bring additional fun and business use cases for their customers.
From CAPEX perspective, if fix or cable telcos are investing in IMS and SBC to provide VoIP or IP media, the same infrastructure can be used to deliver RCS, increasing ROI from already decided and needed investments with the extra cases.
Users will costume to keep several RCS accounts (identities) in the same way that they are right now owning several email accounts or OTT messaging IDs. Value added services as "aggregating" those accounts and let the users set their own messaging policy/rules (IM-Box, auto-responses, filters, messaging divert, videoshare divert etc), we have the IMS AS to allow that, the RCS-e Personal Manager.

- Why not being the fix, cable or broadband carriers being the first ones to deliver those experiences o personal freedom to their users?
- Why not triple play telcos start thinking in "communication as a whole" and not a mere addition different revenue source branches?
- Why not starting to offer fix/TV RCS portable to mobile if the non MNO is also a MVNO?

Solaiemes is a rebel company :-) We like to destroy topics: pioneer technology can be created in a country with no telco equipment companies tradition, small tech start-ups can compete head-to-head with big ones of the telco infrastructure industry (our common challenge these days) and we want to help also non-mobile telcos destroying the industry feeling that fix or cable telcos are not the coolest.

Let's give a try!

Telco Dilemma, Apps "toll" or new services to compete with smartphone apps?

Major telcos published by the end of July their results for H1 2011, showing benefits and worries about the future and how mature services as SMS are declining. Smartphones providing thousands of applications are moving the innovation outside the operator, sometimes to really small companies, using their services only as a data pipe (mobile broadband or Wi-Fi). And strong competition on mature markets forces to reduce the prices.

KPN presented on the Investor Day data that is important to take into consideration:  penetration of Whatsapp on Smartphone users is 85% (in April 2011). To reduce the impact of the loss of revenue they have announced an increase of the prices of Mobile Broadband on September 5th, as the regulator is defending the net neutrality. Maybe it is not such good idea just to try to get more money for the same services (connectivity) instead of offering their own OTT services to compete against popular applications as Whatsapp or Skype.

Incumbent operators have lots of customers, the whole population in fact, with different income levels that would continue becoming loyal customers of their telco if they feel that value for money of the services provided is great, no matter the device they are using.

RCS-e is the opportunity for MNO or MVNO to offer a wide range of new services "OTT" competing with other pure OTT alternatives, with the strengths that telcos are still keeping (user real identities, 100% penetration, interoperability).

Coming LTE will increase the mobile broadband capacity, no sense to complain about investing in LTE and others (OTT) taking the bigger slice of the revenue cake.
Carriers must invest simoultaneusly in access technology (HSPA & LTE) and in VAS technologies in order to keep the broadband business and increase their share of the over the top revenue cake. In terms of investment, RCS-e technology (RCS-e Core and RCS-e VAS platforms) is an affordable investment compared to the deployment of LTE & HSPA networks.
It's time for action !

David Culebras

Credit: image by Wiangya

When the small teams are the only ones who can make the elephants run.

2011 is a very important year for our company, RCS-e is launching, and we are in a good position with 2 ready to market platforms, opening RCS-e and making RCS-e ubiquitous; both interoperated with most core and client vendors, and recognized with the RCS DevChallenge Award as the most innovative RCS solutons.

On the other hand, we are a small team, with limited funding, and facing what the carriers consider "your problem is your size". Obviously it is and egg-and-chicken issue, if customers or potential customers are delaying orders or keeping under NDA the initial references and the company is based in Spain, waiting for VC rounds is basically expect a miracle, and we also gave up trying to actively raise funding (but of course, new business angels or VC's are welcomed on board).

We understood that the "risk avoidance" way of thinking from decision takers is still present coming from decades of inertia, but the timing has changed. The established telecom giant vendors have failed to move the telco elephants but the elephants need to move in the new scenario where they have the OTT's as competitors.

Most of the alternative OTT's are also small team, working fast and with offerings tested and used everyday by zillions of individuals ... their technologies work, are proven to be scalable and their vision is accepted by the users. Of course, Skype is now a relatively big company, but what about WhatsApp? great messaging product by a small focused team.

If telcos need to make feasible their own alternative OTT vision, they need to rely on small companies: motivated teams to help them moving to the next stage. Reluctance to work with small companies means missing opportunities, stay stopped while things happens around you, and new scenarios and business communication models are apearing every day. We are eager to cooperate with telcos & the telco business need some fresh blood, take us in count and elephants will run faster than the Road Runner :-)

Big fishes, small fishes, who eats who?

We are just facing the decisive time regarding the boost of mobility. Till now, carriers considered themshelves the big fishes, owners of the market,
and able to eat the small fishes at any moment. But that is becoming increasingly unclear. Once extended the mobile data, with a fixed monthly
fee for data, external service providers (basically internet-style service providers) pay more attention to mobility. Till now, in mobility they were small fishes, very limited by the walled garden carrier model, but that is changing.
Internet (and HW) companies such as Google, Skype, Apple/iTunes are seeing increasingly capable devices and affordable mobile data prices as their opportunity. In mobility they can be considered small fishes, but they are really big fishes overall, and not only big, also fast swimmers.
Application marketplaces where revenues from apps are shared between providers and the marketplace owners are constraining possible carrier value added solutions based revenue, and even in the case of "loved by users" devices, they are forced to share their data revenue with the manufacturer :-) It is clear that the big fish is not so big, the small fish is not so small, or even being smaller their strategy is better.

Could the carriers avoid becoming a mere dumb pipe, what they consider a defeat? Yes, but....
The internet-style boost of mobility has weaknesses: apps, device fragmentation, no common use model, the target of users is not the whole mobile user. Carriers can offer rich solutions based on common services, easy to learn and compatible with most devices, they can offer the next
generation of SMS model (you learn one service, and you can do very different things). Carriers still have services not properly "squeezed" to get juicy value added services, VideoCall/VideoShare, Push to Talk, and right now RCS (Rich Communication Suite) are, properly combined, an incredible framework to build mobile solutions on.
Then, the operators have not been defeated yet, but they need perhaps to be smaller but faster, in the modern world speed and time to market are more important than sheer size.

Obviously carriers can try to block protocols, but the generalized use of mobile data is changing the mind of regulators, and they are more keen on supporting mobile net neutrality.

The lessons learnt from internet says that Skype becomes long distance minutes leader, succesful VoIP providers leading the integration of voice with apps (Voxeo, Ifbyphone, Twilio, etc), Google Voice becoming a real alternative. In mobility the device fragmentation offer an opportunity to carriers, the only ones who have the capability and the goal to offer new possibilities to mid and low tier users, and monetize that.

The future of carriers still depends on themshelves, but only for a little while, they have to move faster and offer their alternative, boosting the mobility based on common mobile services being used by 3rd party ecosystem to deliver use cases based on them.

New ppt Company Profile, have a look !!!

We just created a company profile presentation, trying to explain our vision about mobile services, bottlenecks of current (walled-garden) and the alternative (the bit pipe), and explain our approach to boost mobile services and solutions and how we positionate our portfolio to increase the possible data based services and improve usability of existing ones . Feedback more than welcome :-)

Services anybody?

ITU-T hosted in Geneva during the past week a workshop on "Multimedia in NGN". Interesting topics discussed but mainly from a technical point of view.

Everybody talks about the same services as the "NGN services":

Killer applications?: Video Blogging, Sharing, Video Ring Back Tones, Video to voice call continuity, innovative AMS applications
[From the summary notes from session "Using NGN capabilities to deliver multimedia services"]

Is this what the mass market wants?. I very much doubt it. These services need expensive devices, user experience are very complex, and will probably also generate expensive bills, as carriers will want to recover investment very quickly. Users can do most of these things now using on their PCs without any NGN.

The most interesting presentation was by NTT ("NTT's challenge: create new business on the NGN") and provided some interesting point of views about NTT perception of the NGN from a services point of view. They expect a massive user migration to FTTH networks, the raising curve of the number of FTTH users will catch DSL users in the first quarter of 2008.

Most importantly, NTT realizes that "The NTT Group cannot by itself make the most effective use of the NGN", they will build the session control around IMS but the services to network interfaces (SNI) will be opened to other companies and service providers, with several models considered: application hosted in NTT, 3rd party service provider directly accessing the SNI, etc. This is clearly the way forward (and NTT DoCoMo implemented it right in i-mode).

NTT is working on a very interesting service classification:

• Daily life services, such as telemetrics for utility companies, home automation / domotics, control of multimedia equipment, etc.
• Business related services, with examples a bit unrealistic, such as a bigger-than-life video conference facility that must cost a fortune.
  
• Content-related services, following the trend towards digital content, video on demand, etc.

Other topics in the workshop were ubiquitous sensor networks and NGN, etc. Take a look too to the presentation by the 3GPP SA chairman about how they are trying to prevent fragmentation of the IMS standard. And there was a very intriguing presentation about how carriers could embrace peer-2-peer on their own telecom solutions ...

Programme here: http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/worksem/multimedia/200709/programme.html