| Sergey Mikhanov | |
Phone booths as payment machines (Telefónica case study) (July 20, 2009)It always interests me what kind of different telecom-related services are invented in different countries, so when travelling I always look around for something new. During my last trip to Barcelona I noticed very interesting thing related to phone booths in the city — they all feature the Telefónica’s advertisement begging you not to let your prepaid mobile account run dry. What’s so special? Well, it seems like it’s possible to top-up the Movistar phone (Movistar is the mobile division of Telefónica) using the phone booth. You dial a special free number in the booth (and they are on every corner across the city), enter your mobile number and drop coins in — voila! This scheme is of course hardly possible when fixed lines operator and mobile operator do not belong to the same company. However, Verizon and AT&T in the US, O2 (being still close to BT) in UK, and a bunch of operators worldwide could reimplement this useful 24×7 payment service. Nortel to bundle Mobicents SLEE with AS 5200/CS 2000 hardware (May 27, 2009)Nortel may have tough times now, but they deliver good news to the JAIN SLEE community. Ivelin Ivanov, the manager of JBCP initiative in JBoss, recently posted a link to an analysis of the IMS strategy at Nortel. The strategy includes close partnership with RedHat and bundling the JBCP/Mobicents platform with novel Nortel’s IMS softswitches. This is the first example known to me when JAIN SLEE platform is about to be deployed at the operator’s infrastructure using hardware other than commodity servers. Developer could see the benefits of that immediately: legacy Nortel systems could be seamlessly connected to IMS with JBCP at its core. The whole JAIN SLEE infrastructure in Nortel’s equipment is still yet to be opened for the third-party vendors, but closely affiliated companies have already started developming SLEE-based services using JBCP (the article mentions Telekom Austria which is known for its ties to Nortel). Independently of who will inherit the Nortel’s business in the nearest future, it is clear that bundling open platform with carrier-grade equipment should become even more widespread. JAIN SLEE as the mature and evolving standard is in the good position here. OpenCloud started an engineering blog (April 6, 2009)Here’s the link. The blog features the Tip of the week (this one would save me from headache if I would have it half a year ago), and periodically a longer article (here’s the nice fresh one: Don’t forget to subscribe. Alan Quayle on the tide around developers (February 15, 2009)
It is not only about having a direct path to the profit, but also having a cool device in their hands. Apple surely is a leg ahead of anyone because of the ultimate attractiveness of their device (hence the big addressable market for developers). Operators have the advantage to other platform owners (think Nokia, and Palm in the nearest future with Pre) of having access to the client’s account, just like Apple have with iTunes Store and App Store, and they have to expose it to the highest available degree to get developers’ attention. Service delivery platforms in the age of liberal telecom (February 15, 2009)This year’s MWC is only one night away. The article below was about to appear as sponsored editorial of MWC Daily, but at the last moment it was decided not to put this material into the paper. I am willing to share it with my readers. One of the central topics discussed on many telecom conferences during this year was the tremendous success of Web 2.0. The main trend in these discussions usually is the mutual integration of telecom and Web 2.0, or to be more precise how (and if) this integration is possible at all. For service delivery companies, the issue of Web 2.0 on the rise could be considered under another angle by looking at the reasons of its success. There is one of them we are going to discuss here: very low cost of entering the market. During the last years, a significant increase in the production of cheaper telecommunication equipment has been seen. This includes production of small access base stations, or femtocells. Usually backed by Ethernet cable, they could serve as the access point at places where the coverage suffers, or as a replacement for the sockets of traditional telephony, for example in new residential areas. The entry cost for the small telecom company willing to use femtocells is very low, a mere thousands euro, which resembles web landscape that gained its popularity and critical mass of attracted people in part because of the same reason. There are established business models for these small companies: serving the communication needs of the business centre, reducing the load of the main cells and gaining the profit in densely populated areas like airports, or providing coverage of rural areas. However, femtocell users might like to use not only the communication capabilities of the access point, but also the telecommunication services they got used to — voicemail and flexible billing for intra-residential calls to name just a few. The owner of the femtocells will need a service delivery platform providing the same low level of costs like equipment does. The company will also require simplicity, prevalence, and ubiquity of the technology stack this platform is based on. In the situation of liberal telecom market JAIN SLEE platform is the obvious choice. Just as prevalence of free and open products, development tools, frameworks and technologies made Web 2.0 a success, JAIN SLEE may change the landscape of the telecom in the nearest future. Based on the ubiquitous Java technology, the platform may run almost anywhere, and enjoy the expertise of the developers around the globe. Every time a new company will install femtocell anywhere, JAIN SLEE will provide a missing part in the chain consisting of hardware equipment and software platform. We are committed to the wider distribution and adoption of the JAIN SLEE standard, and looking forward to having a telecom landscape a more liberal place. |
|
| Entries (RSS) | © 2007–2012 Sergey Mikhanov | |
|
|