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This report provides an overview of the worldwide
Internet protocol (IP)-based applications services market. It details the
status of the market today, as well as the migration through various stages
of service integration and unification. The report covers all of the major
approaches to IP-based applications service development and provisioning
currently in the marketplace.
Service providers are in the midst of a gradual
evolution from circuit-switched infrastructures to IP-based packet-switched
infrastructures. While much of this evolution to date has taken place in
the transport and access parts of the network, there are now enhanced
services that are being developed and refined. In particular, the
architecture of—and market for—next-generation enhanced services is
beginning to take shape.
Even as the industry focuses much of its energy on
creating the infrastructure to support a new generation of telcom services,
actual revenue contributions made by all of our IP services represent just
0.9 percent of all global wireline and wireless telecommunications services
revenue forecasted for 2006 and just 5.7 percent of service revenue in
2011. Thus, while the attention of the industry focuses on enabling a next
generation of services, the revenue impacts remain modest throughout the
forecast period.
Traditional carriers see IP application platforms as a
means of beginning their slow migration to fully-convergent IP-based
networks and services. Some view the highly personalized services enabled
by IP as the ultimate “sticky” applications that will stem the tide of
customer churn. Other carriers desire new, affordable service applications
that will bring additional revenue streams. Every carrier is looking for
new ways to enhance their service suites, which are rapidly becoming
commoditized.
Interestingly, wireless carriers seem to be making
headway when it comes to the adoption of new architectural and service
paradigms. Given the bandwidth constraints of the medium, the gap between
2G and 3G has been covered in less than a decade. There are compelling
reasons for this phenomenon. Wireless architectures have been exposed and
have embraced open standards very early in their development lifecycles;
therefore, interoperability issues are less formidable as compared to their
wireline counterparts. As a corollary, wireless subscribers are reaping the
benefits of rich services developed by a large number of vendors.
Fundamentally, wireless operators have had more
experience with and greater control over the content in their networks, and
have solid billing platforms, which automatically reassure content providers
of reliable and stable revenues from content provided to wireless
subscribers. Content providers are, therefore, more comfortable with the
wireless domain. The IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-driven paradigm calls
for packetization of the access network to transform the services and
applications to be network agnostic. This has given further impetus to
sophisticated access protocols like high-speed packet data access (HSPDA),
enhanced data rates for GSM evolution (EDGE), and others to hit the market
faster. The drive is led primarily by East Asian and European operators,
with North American (NA) operators catching up.
Wireline carriers also expect operational and
infrastructure savings from deploying new IP-based services. Many incumbent
carriers are choosing to initially implement IP-based services on an overlay
network. Taking this approach, carriers do not have to replace
circuit-switched network elements, which represent sunk costs and have
minimal ongoing operational expenses. In an overlay network scenario, the
packet-switched network is isolated from the circuit-switched network, and
the two are connected via a gateway. Web-based applications can control the
public switched telephone network (PSTN) through this gateway. This
architecture preserves the wireline carrier’s investment while reducing risk
as new opportunities are explored and implemented.
Proof that convergent communications and the world of
IP are starting to become realities can be seen not only from the
development of IP infrastructure elements such as gateways and softswitches,
but also in the development of IP-based application servers, which are
designed to deliver actual revenue-generating services for carriers. To
date, most of the activity in softswitch architectures has focused on cost
reduction. Applications that used to be run on circuit-switched networks
are believed to be much less expensive to implement on IP networks. Now,
the creation of new, enhanced services is becoming more strategically
important for many carriers.
This report focuses on six service provider-hosted IP
services:
·
Residential Video Telephony (RVT) allows end users to
have video calls amongst each other. The end-user equipment could be a
personal computer (PC), an IP-based videophone, or a 3G enabled mobile
phone.
·
Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) enables users to employ
the same end equipment (predominantly mobile phone) in licensed wireless
public networks outside homes and offices as well as unlicensed wireless
private networks inside homes and offices where the network coverage is
poor.
·
File Sharing Services involve the exchange of audio and
video files among networked peers.
·
Streaming Services provide live and on-demand display
of audio and video files and broadcasts on end-user equipment like PCs,
personal digital assistants (PDAs), or 3G-enabled mobile phones in a
real-time fashion by simultaneously downloading, buffering, and playing the
file on the end-user equipment.
·
Location Based Services (LBS) target the physical
location of the user through global positioning service (GPS) or wireless
network-enabled mechanisms in order to facilitate user-specific services.
·
Presence Based Services (PBS) ensure personalization of
modes of communication preferred by the user by defining the availability
and receptiveness towards the modes.
Insight's research suggests that these six services will
be the services.....
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