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 â€” 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.