For all the ‘disruptive' technology hype at an event like MWC, it's often forgotten that there's a huge amount of infinitely complex and vitally important plumbing in the background where the old telco disciplines of reliability and consistency still need to be applied – especially where money's concerned. For Telcordia Technologies, recently celebrating its 25th birthday and successful transition from its days as Bellcore, MWC was an opportunity to focus on both the new opportunities facing the industry ‘previously known as telecoms' and suggest some strategies that could help operators – and their ever widening range of partners – make a successful transition to the future.
High on their agenda – as for a lot of other companies and industry organisations like the TMForum and the GSMA – was mobile advertising. Already a key player in the TMForum's Content Encounter initiative, along with other seminal players like Microsoft, they were keen to highlight the potential that advertising-supported services could play in driving revenues in the rapidly emerging markets of India and South America.
"There are two main strands that operators need support with here," says Michael S. Wojcik, Telcordia's president of Service Delivery Solution (pictured above). "Firstly, there's the need to be able to carry out convergent billing in ‘real' real time. If service providers get that right, their horizons for innovation and experimentation with rich services grow immeasurably wider. That, in marketing terms, translates into more personalisation and customisation – all essential attributes for service providers in the crowded and very price sensitive markets that you find across the planet.
"Complementing this," Wojcik adds, "the ability to easily and securely introduce advertising content and, for example, sponsored calls – along with an obviously high degree of permissive control for the actual end user – opens the way for far more aggressive pricing policies or the chance to partner with powerful brands."
Another significant announcement from the company at the show was the news that it's been selected by the North American Country Code 1 ENUM LLC to build and then manage a Registry service to enable inter-carrier VoIP, multimedia, SMS, MMS and similar applications amongst the service provider and content communities. This essentially allows service providers to map and route subscribers' phone numbers to IP gateways, offering new IP-based services while keeping subscriber telephone numbers as the basis for ubiquitous addressing.