 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2006 |
| Article no.: | 19 | |
| Topic: | Making triple-play work for the subscriber | |
| Author: | James Angelone | |
| Title: | Jr, Vice President of Sales, Asia Pacific | |
| Organisation: | Packetfront | |
| PDF size: | 56KB |
About author
James Angelone Jr is Packetfront’s Vice President of Sales for the Asia Pacific region. Mr Angelone joined Packetfront after 25 years with AT&T and Lucent Technologies, where he managed international telecommunications and broadband networking marketing and sales for both the service provider and enterprise markets. Mr Angelone has served in many executive positions within manufacturing, channel management, marketing and sales, including regional vice president and product marketing & sales director. James Angelone Jr was also the President and co-founder of JAZZ International Marketing, Korea. James Angelone has an MBA in Business Management and has worked and lived in the Asia Pacific region for much of his career.
Article abstract
Triple-play, a voice, video and data bundle, is all just data. The Internet transmits data, but as a best effort service that cannot consistently provide broadcast quality TV or telephone quality voice. Few want to pay for fulltime access to top-level broadband; many would willingly pay for such access based upon momentary needs. The success of triple-play – for individuals and businesses – might well depend upon instant choice, not only of service-levels, but of services on an as-needed basis.
Full Article
What is triple-play The definition of triple-play is usually a voice, video and data bundle, but it is really all just data. The Internet is never better than ‘best effort’ and that is not enough to satisfy the subscribers’ voice and video expectations. We expect the quality we get from broadcast TV channels; we want the triple-play viewing experience to be as good as, or better than, the TV signals (cable, terrestrial or satellite) we are ordinarily accustomed to getting, and the same goes, of course, for telephony. The Internet is just another service distributed over the network. No one lifts an eyebrow when a web page freezes and hangs for seconds or minutes, but if our TV freezes while watching the soccer world-cup we call the customer care centre within minutes. With telephony, one must be able to reach emergency assistance at all times. This requires 99.999 per cent voice service availability, and all agree that Internet is not quite there yet. The requirements for the data services needed to distribute TV, voice and many other types of content or service, obviously, are quite different from those for basic, best effort, Internet access. What the consumer really wants What the consumer really wants is more! High-speed Internet is a start, but today’s consumer wants more… more services, individual services and the ability to decide exactly what they want and when. The customer wants freedom of choice and a wider selection of service offerings they can manage themselves. Subscribers also want to be able to change their services instantly. Who wants to wait five to ten working days before a new service, or even a new service provider, is activated? How could this work? Internet – during most of the week I am the ‘average Joe’ when it comes to the bandwidth I actually consume. I read emails, browse the web maybe download a few songs from iTunes. I rarely need anything more than 512Kbps to 2Mbps, but then comes the weekend – 48 hours of free time. Let us assume that I am heavily into online gaming; realistically, 512Kbps or even 2Mbps will not do it, so I want more, perhaps 10Mbps, over the weekend. I am willing to pay more for the extra capacity boost – that adrenaline rush. So I simply log onto my broadband portal and choose the capacity boost that makes my online gaming really enjoyable. A few mouse clicks and I am ready for an action- packed weekend of online gaming, all for an extra US$5 on my next invoice. On Fridays, I work from home, connecting my laptop to my office LAN with a 2Mbps secure service invoiced directly to my company. Many families, today, have more than one PC, so each member of the family should be able to choose different Internet services. Mom and Dad are typically low end users with low bandwidth requirements. The teenagers, on the other hand, have different ‘must-have’ capacity needs, and having them use part of their allowance to pay their own Internet consumption gives them a feeling of independence. For the broadband operator, the real issue is the ability, and advantage, to offer more and get paid more – truly a much different, and much better, value proposition than today’s ‘Fat Pipe’ low price. Voice – telephony is quite simply telephony, nothing fancy about it, but there might just be some small, neat features available. Operators could, for example, offer a feature-packed online voicemail service as an alternative to the old-fashioned, limited- capacity, low-voice-quality, answering machine. A subscriber could sit at work and, going to their service portal, record a new answering message or check if someone has left a message. Not a killer application, but nice to have and, of course, it comes with a small additional fee. TV/Video – Why is it one always has to subscribe to more TV channels than one really uses? Out of the, say, 75 cable channels a user might subscribe to today, many will view only a handful on a regular basis and maybe another two to three occasionally. In the world of IPTV with all the flexibility it can have one should be able to create one’s a la carte channel package with only the channels they are interested in watching. Of course, it would probably cost more per channel than with the 75-channel bundle, but it would still cost less per month and it would be so much more efficient with the remote zapping between five to ten channels one really views than between 75 channels. Video on demand, VoD, is another service that lets one make more and better choices. Instead of going to the local video rental store and trying, by reading the description on the DVD’s cover, to figure out if a film is worth spending any money on renting, one could sit in front of one’s TV, using the remote and keyboard of an IP set-top-box, read reviews and watch trailers to decide. One gets what one wants to watch when one wants to watch and the service provider earns more money; it seems like a winning situation for both. Looking at the above examples of how we as consumers can make our own choices and tailor the services to fit our needs, why not add yet another level of possible choices? It is quite unfortunate, but for most consumers today, telecom services are too connection oriented. The network access most people get at their homes today defines the services they can get, but is there a better experience to be had? Probably. Why do we go to the mall for shopping? Simply said, freedom of choice is the simple answer; the typi cal shopping mall offers a great variety of different brands, models and alternatives and a goodly number of diverse stores to choose from – a place to find everything one wants and needs all under the same roof. Airports are another brilliant example of how bringing together all the leading providers in the same place offers the consumer, the traveller, convenient access to a variety of choices. Today, in most parts of the world, the telecom sector can be compared with what it would be like if every airline carrier operated its own airports. From the consumer’s perspective, the networks should be separated from the services. This would let the various providers focus on their respective core business of building and operating network infrastructure or operating service platforms and maintaining end user relationships and billing. The concept of open access to telecommunications facilities and networks means risk sharing, and is probably the only way forward when it comes to network connectivity and especially service offerings for rural areas. Socio-economic impact Some say business is global and yes, it is global, but at the same time very local. How do we enable the small enterprises to stay local but still act on a global market? Being connected, having access to a multitude of services, and the ability to access and choose among a variety of tailored services, enables individuals as well as enterprises to compete, learn and act on the global market. This builds business; at the same time, society benefits from the increased tax revenues this generates and from the decrease in urbanization rates. We have seen real life examples of how open access has enabled local service providers to emerge simply because the access this gives them to existing infrastructure lets them deliver their services locally. Local service providers boldly state that, “In competition, we beat the telco nine times out of ten simply because the small enterprises in our town know who we are and trust us”. The telco-centric network model will never stimulate that kind of economic growth in the smaller municipalities; it will never accommodate the emergence of new innovative start-ups with unique ideas and concepts. This can significantly hinder the economic decentralisation and diversification plans encompassed by many Asian leaders; conversely, open access provides the sort of economic stimulus that fosters the diversified growth of local economies. Additionally, as stated before, the Internet merely provides best effort service and may not be reliable enough for other services needed for local development and economic growth, such as e-learning, e-health, e-government etc. Making triple-play work for the subscriber affords freedom of choice. Not only the freedom to obtain tailored service offerings, but also the freedom to select and manage an individual, personalised, service portfolio, without having to wait for a service provider to implement a request for change. Even more attractive from the subscriber’s perspective is having the freedom to choose services from a wide range of service providers – instantly, anytime, anywhere. Challenging, yes! Impossible, no!
