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.

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