Responsabilidad social ciudadana.

This is where I would like to have been able to give you, the reader, the path to that elusive ‘killer-app’ of services; alas, if anyone knows it, I am sure they’re not telling. What I will do is give what I believe as some of the important aspects of next-generation networks for you to consider within your own environment. The paragraphs that follow highlight some of the key points of the book and put them in the context of the business decision to be made.

Do not think class 5 switches (local exchange features) are the only way of delivering class 5 features, think softswitches, and be careful not to re- invent the wheel. Only implement those features that your customers really need. Softswitches offer much greater flexibility for integration of other features such as Unified Communications (UC) and presence to existing Plain Old Telephony Service (POTS) style services.

Look to extend the reach of the network as far out to the customer as you can to create tie-in for service provision. This is a key point for those companies looking to capitalise on market changes such as unbundling in the local loop. If access to the local loop is a business goal, look at perhaps providing an application on customers’ premises. This might seem coun- ter to the goal of providing hosted services, but not all aspects of the service need to be hosted.

Make strategic partnerships with key content vendors and service providers – for example Hutchison 3G has cut a deal for the streaming delivery of football matches and a deal with 186k for provision of band- width.

Look to your Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS) and ensure they have the flexibility to accom- modate and process XML records both for the mediation of XML usage records, and for the exchange of billing information between organisa- tions. This will help streamline communications between partners and reduce cost.

Create products and services that are as flexible as possible and that are endpoint delivery mechanism independent (i.e. multi-channel capable). UC is a good example of this. The main functional component of a UC solution is the in-box. All the other components of a UC solution are about accessing that in-box, irrespective of the means chosen to reach it, email, and voice browsing or web access.

Look to Megaco as a transition architecture to move your existing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) services to a packet switch network infrastructure, only use it where you believe you can’t live with- out some of those class 5 features that the supplier of your Megaco MGC will support or if you need to transition profitable Intelligent Network (IN) services to a packet switched network (for example you may have invested heavily in Service Control Points (SCPs) and need to write off the

equipment). Remember the Media Gateways (MGs) are there only to preserve the circuit switched world, when the circuit switches go, so do the media gateways and signalling gateways to the PSTN. When going down this route, think about the future features the media gateway controller will need to provide and consider how important this flexibility is to the future services. Softswitches may be a better choice if they also integrate with media and signalling gateways. Softswitches generally provide a superset of features above the media gateway controllers that are basically re-compiled cousins of the stored program controller code of the particular vendor’s circuit switch.

Look to softswitches and application servers as the means to integrate old and new worlds when you have no existing infrastructure to protect. Softswitches should be able to support all the old and new protocols you need and certainly should be capable of interfacing to and controlling MGs where necessary. Think softswitch for call control, and application servers for serious integrated enhanced services.

If you are a fixed network vendor, remember Fixed Mobile Integration (FMI), we all tried in various ways to make this happen in the circuit switched world. I think its time has come again, look to create strategic partnerships with 3G network operators. As palmtop devices get location capabilities, wouldn’t it be a good offer to a customer if they only ever needed one device, whether they were at home or on the move. Create services that can capitalise on the location and route calls based on it (see the example service at the end of Chapter 13).

Look to use directories as much as possible to integrate your Business Systems (BSS). Meta-directories (see Chapter 9) are an important tool for gluing together your business systems with business processes – only change information once and see the power of it being reflected in all your other systems.

Think of customer care as the pinnacle of your organisation’s focus towards the customers, if customer care can see all the information neces- sary to keep your customers happy, they can monitor the customer life cycle. With all the information glued together through a meta-directory, marketing can use this information to target campaigns.

Create services that customers can control through simple interfaces, if it is easy for customers to request services via web pages and have them provisioned automatically then take-up will be quicker and less costly (if you get it right).

Promote mixed media access to services and make good use of Internet Protocol Interactive Voice Response (IP-IVR) to enhance services with voice. Speech recognition is a powerful tool when used with web access and text-to-speech as a voice portal service. Mobile devices don’t have a lot of room for keyboards and large displays. Having an intelligent service linked to a diary and speech recognition can make organising your day much easier.

EXPECTATION AND REALISATION

Think about how you can make your services generic, white-label services can be sold wholesale and re-labelled. This has implications on the platforms you use and how they are managed. Think about having to tier your management interfaces to allow different levels of access and partitioning of the view of services. Think about how management inter- faces and management information can be customised through the use of XML and style sheets.

As a service industry company, look at how the market segmentation (Figure 14.1) is creating the need for new service level agreements and contracts between equipment vendors’ service providers and telcos; and service provider to service provider. And look for consultative service opportunities around process change and technology change. Systems integrators have a lot to offer telcos and xSPs, both parties need to recog- nise this and make good the services offered.

Take care when constructing the packet-based infrastructure to carry real-time audio signals; do not put cost reduction before quality (see the closing remark in Section 2.2 on voice compression and quality). Care must also be taken on what is carried in the voice encoded bit streams, modem traffic and fax calls don’t take too kindly to being exposed to voice compression schemes. Keep track of latency, packet loss and desequen- cing of packets, all of these will affect the listener quality of the voice. These considerations can be relaxed to some degree if the network is to carry broadcast traffic such as near video on demand, as buffering of the transmitted signals can be employed (at the expense of increased latency). Don’t treat all voice gateways as the same just because they provide the same encoding algorithms, the techniques to cope with packet loss, jitter and timing when converting between circuit switched telephony and packet switched telephony are at the time of writing proprietary to the vendor of the gateway.

Figure 14.2 shows the elements that fit together to form the business of next-generation networks, think about how these fit together to provide services you can sell.

The main commodity components for new services (as indicated in Figure 14.2) are content, bandwidth, mobility and fixed access. The combination of these into new services and the delivery model of these services are where the service providers come in.

Customers will be looking to service providers to provide the complete life cycle of products, from delivery through to help and maintenance. The next-generation network services will consist of complex components that all need to work together in a seamless way. In order to market these new services as life-style products, not only do the products have to be mass market, but they also have to be easy to maintain and cheap to maintain. Nokia have taught everyone a valuable lesson – mobile phones can be fashion statements, their express-onecovers are extremely cheap

to manufacture but sell at a high margin.