Finding Services and Business Models for the Next-Generation Networks

The standardisation bodies

The telephone communication network had a key important requirement: breaking boundaries. Achieving such an objective was a matter of standardising every single protocol
used in the network. For that purpose, many governments and private parties created committees to provide a unique standard. Players such as the service providers, system integrators, manufacturers, content providers and IT providers joined such bodies to present their vision. The crucial factor then was the vision that each party brought to the body, influenced by factors such as region and place in the value chain, etc. (Grøtnes Endre, 2008) Although necessary, it proved to be bureaucratic, leading to a slower time to market. The time that elapsed between each new release was too long, which proved fatal for bringing the right innovation. Bodies such as the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the ETSI (European Telecommunication Standards Institute), the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Program) covered standards ranging from radio transmission, network protocols and features. The key finding was that those bodies discussed not only technical matters, but a great deal of business strategy. Competitors where sitting at the same table discussing how to enable a new feature, which could potentially, increase the gap among them. Although some of the key features were hidden so that they could have a key advantage over their competitors.

4. The next generation networks

Earlier experiences showed service providers that it was urgent to come up with new ideas and to embrace innovation. The key point was to achieve faster time to market because the internet was seen as a threat to their business. Specifically, service providers were concerned about new ways of generating revenue streams which were different to those that they had. The deployment of broadband services proved to be the perfect stimulus for the mobile service providers. At one point, users could participate in chats, send electronic emails, and download videos or images.
The 3GPP standardisation body assumed the role of leading the way towards more open and simple communication protocols. Their vision was to embrace a packet network that could transport any content through end points. That required migrating from a circuit switched network, to a packet based network, whilst at the same time assuring the same quality that was delivered with the old network. The protocol used for building the network was the IP protocol (Ajit Jaokar & Chetan Sharma, 2010), used my billions of computers around the world. The IP protocol had the robustness required by service providers while providing more flexible schemas. The new core network was called IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) (Bertrand Gilles, 2007). The IMS was to be built around IP, which was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The 3GPP requested IETF for their help with building the necessary protocols around the IMS idea. If the 3GPP required any ability, the IETF was responsible for delivering such protocol.
The primary goal of the architecture was to enable launching richer services that could potentially be used by any customer. The voicemail is a perfect example of such a service. It was very common to have a voicemail for the fixed phone and a voicemail for the mobile phone. Bringing convergence was easy, decoupling the access layer from the service layer, so that no matter how you accessed the voicemail, it worked for both scenarios. By separating the access layer, the transport layer, the control layer and the services layer, service providers could provide seamless access to their service despite which device the customer was using.
As a result, service providers could increase their service mix because they were not tied to any specific access layer. Therefore, you could watch a video from your mobile phone, chat from your fixed phone, etc.

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