 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific III 2008 |
| Article no.: | 12 | |
| Topic: | Continually mobile lifestyle | |
| Author: | Mark Pugerude | |
| Title: | Chief Marketing Officer | |
| Organisation: | NextPoint Networks | |
| PDF size: | 410KB |
About author
Mark Pugerude is the Chief Marketing Officer of NextPoint Networks; he has 18 years of product management experience in the telecommunications industry. Mr Pugerude was previously Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Broadwing Communications, LLC. Prior to joining Broadwing, Mr Pugerude served as Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at PingTone Communications; as Vice President of Sales at Blue Ridge Networks; and served at Nokia Networks, as Managing Director of Sales for US East. Mr Pugerude began his career in the telecommunications industry while working for Motorola in the Communications and Electronics division. Mark Pugerude received his Bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University.
Article abstract
Today, mobile phones connect you not just to voice, but also to video and data. Prices are going down and the sophistication of the devices and the number of available features grow. Broadband data, video and a vast amount of content of all types, and in all languages, is increasingly available. Subscribers are also using the new mobile devices and networks to keep in constant touch with their on-line community and a mobile-centred, continuously connected mobile lifestyle is evolving.
Full Article
Innovation and challenge Billions of consumers around the world are taking advantage of more powerful devices, lower cost services, higher bandwidth, oceans of content and a desire to stay connected with their communities. As the stakes rise, they are no longer willing to give up access or quality in a continually mobile world. ‘Walking the walk while talking the talk’ was just the beginning of the new mobile lifestyle. Around the world, people are living in real-time using mobile phones to listen to music, share photos, watch videos and play interactive games – and it’s not just fun and games. More and more businesses are tapping applications that enable workers to move around with unprecedented productivity and ease – often while being managed as well as empowered through real-time applications integrated with GPS and other presence technologies. The overwhelming success of the iPhone, coupled with Google’s entry into the mobile space with open source handsets and networks, has sent a clear signal to traditional mobile operators. For manufacturers of mobile devices, the bar is set higher every day because mobile devices have become much more than phones. Today, they are miniaturized personal computers over which, according to Apple’s advertising campaign, one can also make a phone call. We are moving to a world where rich media applications, driven by Web 2.0 players, will fundamentally change the value relationship network operators currently enjoy with their subscribers. In the ‘old world’ value chain, the carrier is the source of value. Using combinations of devices, networks, price bundles and services, operators compete with each other based on price, handsets and a closed set of applications on those devices. In the ‘new world’, the closed system will be opened up, offering new choices of content, functionality and value. Currently, network operators are not obliged to accept these open features, and they will most likely block them until they figure out how to control, monetize and protect their core networks from them. By clinging to closed network architectures, operators are merely postponing the inevitable and missing out on the valuable opportunities presented by IP mobility. A single monolithic approach controlled by a single vendor is no longer a solution; it is a problem. The transition will most hurt operators who are unable or unwilling to adapt to their new positions and responsibilities. If an operator falls behind and loses out on these early advantages, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to catch up to their competitors as they gain momentum and traction in the marketplace. Open networking will expose operators to a new level of competition for which they will have to prepare. Operators will have the additional challenge of keeping their networks up to date in relation to the demand of developers and customers. As such, they will need an architecture that has the power and flexibility to connect and carry all current and future access devices and services. Raising the bar Today’s interim approaches are short-term solutions, as the nimble and adaptive culture of Web 2.0 players will present a relentless barrage of applications aimed at satisfying the consumer. These applications will be developed based on a fundamental understanding of – and unprecedented access to – the consumers’ profiles, search histories and behavioural information. Consumers are increasingly more sophisticated and on the move, and operators will need to evolve their access networks to keep up with the explosion of data traffic and high-speed mobile downloads. From the operators’ standpoint, the challenge is protecting the core, while alleviating congestion at the edge of the network. A few startling statistics: • The number of worldwide mobile connections is expected to grow 50 per cent from 2.7 billion in 2006 to 4 billion in 2010 according to Wireless Intelligence; • Gartner estimates that one in three phones sold by 2010 will be smartphones with voice and data capability; and, • Google’s servers process one Petabyte of data every 72 minutes, according to Google. Web 2.0 can be thought of as an implicit architecture of participation where consumers call the shots, and sophisticated Web 2.0 companies exploit the Web’s ‘long tail’ structure, a fact that emphasizes the demand and elasticity with which carriers have to contend. A good example is the now ubiquitous use of blogging with syndication and social networking sites, which are growing explosively. In one month in 2008, over 110 million people visited these sites, according to the Wall Street Journal. A massive amount of traffic exists and continues to grow based on more sophisticated personal social networks, unpredictable syndication events and general peer-to-peer traffic. Operators are partnering with handset manufacturers to bring location and context awareness to Web 2.0 services because real-time presence features will be a major advantage in a mobile networking environment. Now, thanks to advanced=edge devices, consumers are going mobile, with the added dimension of phones that record and transmit content on the fly, much like a human driven sensor network. Visitors use these sites as virtual clubs where they communicate with communities of interest using voice, data and multimedia applications. While they were once considered a venue for college students, these networks are becoming social grids. In this role, social networks have used small world effect dynamics to become powerful enablers in the international business world, as well as tremendous creative tools for entrepreneurs and the next generation of global companies. These communities of interest are turning into communities of practice, and they are enabling financial traders, physicians, public safety organizations, scientists, and others to make their presence known – on a selective basis – through more traditional IP networks. The addition of mobility has natural benefits and, on top of providing mobility, the new IP networks are being called upon to support secure financial and business transactions. Even when it comes to children, mobile devices are not just for fun and games. A lot of attention being paid to photo sharing, music gifting, games and downloading virtual pets (and all of their accessories), but according to In-Stat, in 2012 the market for youth oriented ‘edutainment’ devices will reach US$9 billion. Continuous mobility – who pays? Google and others see the opportunity to extend the lucrative behavioural advertising market, which is projected to reach US$3.5 billion by 2011, according to emarketer.com, to the burgeoning mobile world. The explosive growth of the public Internet was in large part paid for by advertising paving the information superhighway. Today thousands of initiatives are currently underway to bring technologies and business models to market that will offer free handsets or services to consumers that agree to watch advertising material. As ad-supported models and platforms mature, more content will be subsidized. This will drive more free voice, data and video sessions in exchange for giving advertisers the ability to target the end-user based upon their behavioural profiles and geographic locations. So how can carriers compete or collaborate with companies that are working hard to relegate them to mere bit-pipe suppliers by stripping away their value-based relationship with subscribers? By understanding that database management is a core competency and that data can be leveraged by using powerful tools and capabilities that Web 2.0 players are unable to match, to access: • location data; • presence data; • subscriber profile and behaviour data; • billing information; and, • quality of service guarantees The seamless experience The IP world is blended, and the lines are blurring between home and office-based browsing and communications. This trend is the same – if not more pronounced – in the mobile world. There is continued growth in the fixed, mobile, access and interconnect worlds. Although fixed services will continue to give way to mobile services, the winners will be the service providers who provide a nearly transparent morphing of the fixed and mobile worlds for their customers. Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) and IP media subsystem (IMS) technologies will make it possible for sessions to pass seamlessly between devices, and wired and wireless networks, and enable carriers to offer quad-play (voice, video, broadband Internet and mobility) combined with ‘presence’ and high definition. With the iPhone, gPhone and, increasingly, sophisticated edge devices flooding the world along with massive amounts of video and audio content, network providers must step up and constantly evolve their networks. If they fail to do so, they risk being relegated to ‘dumb pipe’ transport services. Rich content in the form of social networking and video-on-demand, both self-created and shared, is not years out – it’s happening now. The challenges are here today, and only those who recognize and respond to the new dynamics will survive. To quote Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptive to change.”
