Throughout the incredible journey of the telecom OSS/BSS sector over
the last 10 years, VanillaPlus has remained a reliable source of both key
news but also informative, objective and thought-provoking assessments of
the key trends which have shaped our industry. I am looking forward to
VanillaPlus and their more recent Stream journal continuing to play a key
role in providing valuable insights as we enter one of the most exciting
phases of the telecoms OSS/BSS market evolutions.
Kieran Moynihan
Vice President & CTO Telecoms
IBM Tivoli Division
Round Table: Interconnect brokers, Music...
Brokers, outsourcing, music interfaces:
There’s a lot going on in interconnect!
Four experts look into their crystal ball to see the future for settlement brokers, outsourcing, and music interfaces.
Chairman – Jeremy Cowan, Editor, VanillaPlus
Panel – Martin Browne, CEO, i-conX solutions
Barbara Lancaster, President, LTC International
Bareah Shankiti, Revenue Assurance & Fraud Manager – Finance, Zain Kuwait
Arnold Buddenberg, Head of Joint Venture Technology – Information Systems, T-Mobile International
On mobile music …
Jeremy Cowan: There is a significant impact from IP, not least of all on interconnect. Martin, what are your customers saying about the particularly the termination of flat rate or free services?
Martin Browne: The range of services that IP allows gives you a wider number of events to handle. So you’ve got push-to-talk, shared video and an increasing number that go beyond voice. Each of those has its own billing and quality requirements. The quality required to hear someone talking to you maybe different from the quality required to, say, watch a video clip.
You’ve probably heard that Nokia has launched a music offering. People who buy a Nokia handset for a flat fee will be able to download apparently unlimited amounts of music; we’ll have to see
how that pans out.
Arnold Buddenberg: Operators are quite slow in defining these different services in interconnect billing. For example, in SMS it was quickly defined, but for MMS it took longer for operators to have an agreement. For Instant Messaging agreements between operators, discussions started, but never resulted in a service with interconnect agreements between operators. On data there is an interconnection agreement which reflects a fee per session. But this is independent of the data content. It can be an internet search or a music download.
To download the full article (PDF, 562Kb) visit:
http://www.vanillaplus.com/downloads/Van+ Aug 08 26-29.pdf