Jun 21, 2010 08:07 PMWe're happy to announce that the Amdocs blogging community has recently expanded to include a growing number of new blogs supported by a new, feature-rich blogging platform. Learn more and join the conversation today! Jun 10, 2010 03:29 AM
 There was no mincing of words here. "The telco business is dead if you don't innovate," Loo Cheng Chuan, the head of SingTel Ideas Factory, told a group of Amdocs employees recently during the first-ever SingTel visit to the company's offices.
And looking ahead at consumer technology trends for the coming months, particularly Web TV, Mr. Loo was also just as emphatic: "The first company to crack Social TV will be the next Facebook."
Other trends on his radar include 3D TV ("the next big wave"), next-generation cloud gaming, music streaming on mobile phones, e-readers as more iPads, tablets and slates hit the market, next-generation virtual assistants (check out Apple's recent purchase of Siri), the increasing popularity of Android phones and Sixth Sense apps.
The crux of Mr. Loo's argument is that innovation "engages customers at a different level of engagement" than just connectivity, which is becoming ubiquitous. Moreover, in his view, innovation is the only profitable strategy for service providers in a saturated market as well as being the only way to disengage from costly price wars.
Mr. Loo was visiting Amdocs as part of the Amdocs Engage! project, a global business development program which nurtures and promotes joint business opportunities between Amdocs, start-up companies and leading service providers such as SingTel, Asia's largest multi-market mobile operator with over 285 million mobile customers. Jun 04, 2010 08:40 PM
 By 2017, there will be a predicted seven trillion networked devices. To support this connected world, where bandwidth-hungry devices and applications are connected anytime and anywhere, service providers will have no choice but to upgrade their networks to overcome the looming capacity crunch. No-one is feeling this pressure more than wireline operators who are currently running different DSL technologies along the copper cables covering "the last mile" between the nearest local street cabinet and the home.
These service providers are already facing stiff competition from cable operators, who today can offer approximately 100Mbps by using DOCSIS3 technology, and from mobile operators who are moving towards LTE. And whilst we may be heading towards a fully connected world of sophisticated smart homes, even now the bandwidth needs of a "regular" household are proving too much for copper-to-xDSL technology to support. Just try carrying out multiple activities at the same time – some with much higher capacity demands than the others – like watching an HD movie online, uploading photos to Facebook, and downloading MP3s. You can't fail to notice how they affect and disrupt each other as they fight to claim the limited bandwidth.
That's not the case with fiber. It's the most suitable technology for providing broadband access in the connected world and can easily deliver more than 1Gbps – just compare that to the lower than 50Mbps speed provided by copper-to-xDSL technology. Service providers are also facing regulatory pressures to switch from copper to fiber as governments seek to promote national broadband network projects in order to use fiber's superior capacity to increase competition and drive economic dynamism.
The not-so-inconsiderable challenge lies with finding the best way to deploy an FTTx project which is, by default, expensive, complicated, and has a relatively long payback time. Overcoming these obstacles relies on following a five-step approach which utilizes operational support systems solutions with automated planning, fulfillment, activation and assurance processes. This is examined in a just-published new white paper which explores how wireline service providers should meet and fight the connected world's capacity crunch head on – both in terms of quality of service and return on their investment. Switching to fiber networks is probably inevitable, but it's how service providers decide to get there which will make the difference to their bank balances in the end.
Download the new whitepaper: "Taking the bite out of capacity crunch" May 27, 2010 11:29 PM
 Why isn't it easy to shop for a new mobile phone? With so many retail channels at my disposal and so much information at my fingertips, it should be quite simple and convenient. That's the theory anyway. I started my research online, visiting different mobile operators' web sites to try to narrow down the selection. The problem with this was that most sites didn't provide enough meaningful information about each phone (and I'm not talking about cryptic acronyms and highly technical features that no consumer understands). Some of them didn't even enable me to compare phones according to their features (for example: Bluetooth connectivity, touch screen, etc) or their price plans. That made it difficult to decide between them, especially when it involves a 2-year contractual commitment to the phone I end up choosing.
I called a contact center to get more information. The problem (here's that word again) is that the rep didn't automatically know which products I had already looked at on the website, so I had to tell him. He also didn't remember all the features and plans by heart, so he started looking up the information himself. The whole thing was starting to become time consuming, so I gave up and decided to actually go to a nearby store of one of the major wireless operators and check out the phones for myself. An added incentive was that this way, I could get my new phone immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be shipped to me.
But once at the store, I didn't find all the phones that I'd selected on the web. Instead, I had to start the process of exploring phones "from scratch", but this time with the help of the "knowledgeable store sales rep". This would have been fine if the rep could actually remember all the features of all the different phones and all the possible plans. Instead, he kept pushing me to take phones he was familiar with rather than a phone that was right for me and would actually meet my needs and my budget. It wasn't a confidence-building experience and I didn't end up buying a phone that day. But I did end up becoming frustrated from having to start the shopping process three separate times.
So here's my wish list for a better customer experience: a service provider web site that helps me to quickly zoom in on a shortlist of my few favorite devices and compare their features and price plans. Then, when I'm ready to order, it will allow me to choose whether I'd like to complete the order online or alternatively, find a store which has the phone in stock so that I can get it that same day. I'd also really like it if both the contact center and store reps could access my online shopping cart (which could also include other selections I might have made around accessories and services) as opposed to starting from the beginning. This way, my store visit would be a quick "in and out", and then I could start using my new phone without any problems at all. Wouldn't that be easier? May 24, 2010 09:28 PM
 No doubt many service providers are cracking open the champagne at the news that Google is shutting its online mobile phone store. As Andy Rubin, Google's head of mobile admitted: "It's clear that many customers like a hands-on experience before buying a phone, and they also want a wide range of service plans to choose from."
But before the celebration of an unusual Google failure gets underway, service providers should take a sober look at their own smartphone sales process. According to a recent survey, one out of six consumers are unaware of their smartphone's advanced features or don't know how to use them. This is a massive revenue opportunity service providers are passing up on; one would think it would be in the service providers' own interest to provide in-store tutorials or after-sales activities to drive additional application and data usage.
And while Google's customer care for the Nexus One came in for criticism, service providers are also not always getting right. Again, according to the survey, more than 50 percent of those polled made a call to the contact center to resolve basic support issues. Furthermore, according to a Yankee Group report, 59 percent of calls to a call center took over an hour to resolve, indicating that call center agents lack the technology and training necessary to resolve these basic customer inquiries at the first instance. As a result, consumers were frequently transferred to more costly technical support agents requiring more time, resources and cost. Notably, just five percent of those polled consulted the service provider's website for support, indicating that smartphone Web self-service resources are underutilized.
Now aside from the fact that the level-1 call agent should have been better equipped to handle the initial call, if the retail assistant at the point of sale had trained the customer on basic usage, then many of these calls would not have been made in the first place. This would save money for the service provider and improve the customer experience.
Google closing its online mobile phone store might be good news for service providers, but is no reason for them to shut up shop on looking at ways to improve how they sell smartphones. May 17, 2010 11:13 PM
 When you think about Costa Rica, you might imagine lush rain forests, volcanoes, great diving and beautiful sandy beaches… Chances are that it doesn't immediately spring to mind as the most dynamic communications market. That's mainly due to the fact that, up until very recently, Costa Rica's 5 million citizens were served by a single service provider, ICE (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad), a government-owned utility company. But all that has now changed with the government's decision to open up the Costa Rican communications market to competition. ICE subsequently decided it needed to transform both its business and operational support systems to become more competitive by being able to create and launch new innovative services and to operate more efficiently.
Faced with a large-scale, time-critical transformation, ICE chose to use the TM Forum Solutions Frameworks to guide its transformation process. Which makes sense. After all, the standards have been specifically designed to encourage the re-use of resources through common terminology and they advocate standardized business-process level integration interfaces. And by enabling service providers to re-use best-practice business processes, it should reduce their deployment time as well as their operational costs. Is this what happened with the massive ICE project?
I'm going to have the opportunity to find out for myself since ICE have decided to talk about their transformation at TeleManagement World Nice on Wednesday, 19 May between 4:00-5:30pm. See you there? May 12, 2010 07:55 PM
 In a previous blog, I suggested that as PayTV takes its next evolutionary step and embraces the Internet as another delivery medium, the principle of paying for TV is far from dead. Viewed content will always be paid for somehow – whether it's "I pay" (subscription or pre-payment), "you pay" (given to me, the consumer, as part of an incentive) or someone else pays (paid by advertising). However, the payment method needs to be contextualized to suit the person consuming it.
For example, young children are unlikely to use their pocket money to watch TV, but will watch an advertisement together with the parent who is watching with them; teenagers won't mind viewing advertisements, but would also be willing to pay for premium content or content that their friends will want to discuss the next day at school. However, the challenge (and the focus) lies with the "twenty-somethings". They were meant to become the next wave of monthly subscribers, but now they have a wide choice of content providers (or aggregators) to whom they can give their money. And they'll do so, but only if they see value in it (and value, as I've explored previously, is contextual).
To see how this might play out, it's worth looking at how recommendations can affect how people select retail electrical goods or home furnishings. Until around 10 years ago, when people sought product advice and recommendations, they would often ask: "who made your fridge?" or "which make of vacuum cleaner would you suggest I buy?" Nowadays the question is typically: "where did you buy that kitchen hob?" or: "where should I go to buy carpets?" In other words, the consumer finds the store that sells quality goods (the aggregator) to be more relevant than the manufacturer (the content creator) who made it.
It's a similar story in the music industry. Apple is now the world's most famous brand as the location to buy music, with most people not knowing (or caring) about the names of the recording labels any more. The same is becoming true for news, with many online users going to Google or Yahoo for news rather than seeking out a particular newspaper site. Apple, Google and Yahoo are all performing aggregator roles, and it's their ability to choose the right content and then place it where different classes of consumer can find, view and purchase it that enables them to command such large followings. This is much the same way that different chains of supermarkets (also aggregators) are known for and differentiated between for their quality of food, prices or amount of product choice available.
Movies and TV clearly have the potential to go the same way. Well-known content-producing brands could be minimized by aggregators who can demonstrate to a target audience that they in fact are the best online site for connecting them with the content that the viewer really wants to see.
Whilst the Internet has lowered the barrier to entry for a new generation of video aggregators, it certainly doesn't mean that the incumbent group will wither and die. On the contrary, the existing cable and satellite operators have been in the aggregation business for several decades and have demonstrated their tenacity at leveraging new technologies – just look at the digital video recorder, cable modems and VoIP telephony.
As this next stage in the evolution of PayTV unfolds, consumers will be spoilt for choice as to where to get their favorite content. The winners (i.e. the service providers who will get to make money) will most likely be the ones who are adept at aggregating the right content for their target audiences and who are agile enough to exploit the opportunity when it presents itself. It's an interesting time! May 06, 2010 02:06 AM
 Two years ago, TV was pretty much the same as it had been for the previous 30: that is to say, broadcast content organized into streams known as channels, paid for by a combination of advertising and subscriptions, and accessible via an antenna, cable, or satellite dish, and to a lesser degree, DSL. Fast-forward to today and there's much media hype about how TV is changing and predicting the end of subscription TV as we know it, whilst throwing around terms like "TV Everywhere", "over-the-top" (or OTT) and "cord-cutting".
The behavior of my teenage children and their friends suggests that broadcast and subscription TV has run its course as they watch on-demand, ad-funded TV episodes on PCs in their bedroom. If you extend this model into the future when they have become adults with families of their own, it implies that the TV-watching world is doomed to a diet of low-budget and user-generated content on the basis that this is all that the studios will be able to afford to produce if their funding will come from advertising alone.
However, a closer look shows that the reality is somewhat different: rather than watching anything and everything that they just happen to come across, these teenagers are actually quite deliberate when selecting the content they consume. The majority of their choices are based on recommendations – either from their friends via conversations at school or via social networking sites, or promotional events learned about through advertising or other social media such as Twitter. The reason they are watching TV on their PCs is often because it is the one place where they can watch the content and interact with their friends at the same time. As they get older and HDTV navigation and user interaction improves, the momentum to claim the living room will undoubtedly increase, and then my wife and I will have a real fight on our hands.
Curious to find out whether or not this viewing behavior was just localized to my own household, I asked a bunch of my kids' friends, at a recent meal we were having together, as to whether they would be willing to watch six or seven minutes of advertising as a precondition to being able to watch a program or movie that they really wanted to see. All of them had no issue with this whatsoever, and in fact thought it was quite a good deal! Extrapolating this tiny, but most likely representative, sample means it is reasonable to conclude that the idea of paying for high quality content is not about to go away since agreeing to watch an advert is just another form of payment. Regardless of the model that is used to monetize the content, it's clear that it will need to be contextual and personalized by relating it to the consumer's life at that particular moment in time – whether it's their age, their location, their device, and more interestingly, the wisdom of their friends.
Service providers who hope to thrive through this evolutionary period will have recognized the shifts toward user- and relationship-centric delivery models. Now, more than ever, they will rely on the power of their integrated IT infrastructure.
Apr 30, 2010 05:59 PM
 The real danger of this month's US federal appeals court ruling rejecting the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the Internet has little to do with the threat to net neutrality and whether service providers will suddenly soon start charging consumers extra for YouTube access. The sting in the tail comes in the implications the court ruling has for the FCC's national broadband plan, a much-needed program to bring broadband access to 100 million Americans.
To quickly recap: a federal appeals court ruled earlier this month, by a 3-0 majority, that the FCC had no authority to regulate Comcast's network management practices. The FCC had earlier told Comcast it could not limit the amount of broadband available to certain heavy users following complaints the cable company had deliberately throttled its customers' access to the BitTorrent file-sharing service. Following the FCC ruling, Comcast appealed, arguing (successfully as it turned out) that the FCC had no legal right to rule on this issue.
In theory, the appeals court ruling has created a very large hole in the FCC's plans to set net neutrality regulations, which aim to prevent service providers from using their control over Internet access to favor some online content and services over others. But as Comcast and the other large Internet providers are not currently seeking, or indeed have plans to restrict or charge more for specific, bandwidth-heavy Internet content in the immediate future, the court's ruling in terms of its actual impact on net neutrality is more declaratory than practical.
The danger is that the ruling will stymie the FCC's plans to encourage broadband access for the 100 million Americans currently without high-speed Internet. As the FCC notes, broadband "is a foundation for economic growth, job creation, global competitiveness and a better way of life," and yet the US is lagging behind many advanced countries in the adoption of such technology.
To ensure universal access to broadband network services in the US, the FCC's recently revealed national broadband plan proposed creating the Connect America Fund. This would shift up to $15.5 billion over the next decade from the existing Universal Service Fund program – originally set up to ensure an equitable distribution of telephony services across America – to support broadband. Now that the court has ruled the FCC has no regulatory powers over the broadband industry, this plan is in jeopardy as the FCC needs immediately to reassess its whole broadband industry strategy.
There are a couple of ways the FCC could override the court ruling, aside from petitioning the ruling itself. The FCC could classify broadband as a Title II common carrier service, which would then automatically put broadband regulation under its auspices. For this to happen, only three out of the five FCC commissioners would have to agree to this classification, although opposition to such a move from service providers is likely to be fierce. Alternatively, the FCC could lobby for Congress to grant it legal authority over broadband services, but this there is no guarantee there is a majority for such legislation.
Either way, the more time the FCC spends on clarifying its legal status with regard to broadband, the longer it will take activate a national broadband plan. This potentially leaves tens of millions of Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide, at a damaging cost to these individuals personally and the American economy as a whole. Apr 24, 2010 07:53 PM
 The walled garden is collapsing, with consumers increasingly going off-portal to browse and consume from their mobile handsets. That doesn't sound like great news for service providers who are now finding themselves being squeezed out of a very lucrative value chain. After all, mobile Internet usage is powering ahead, thanks partly to broadband networks offering faster speed, and partly due to the enthusiasm with which consumers have embraced smartphones with full HTML browsers. In 2009, smartphone sales increased by 23% while total "traditional" handset sales actually decreased by 1% [Gartner]. Neilsen claimed that 15% of global mobile subscribers browsed the mobile Internet in the latter half of 2009 – which included almost 75% of smartphone users and 90% of iPhone users. And remember - iPhone consumers are all off-portal users… Basically, the number of mobile Internet sites and page views is exploding, with over 2 million mobile sites at the end of 2009 [Yankee] and a 208% increase in page views year on year [Opera software].
Then there's the fact that media and entertainment companies are actually trying to build direct relationships with mobile subscribers, with device manufacturers and Internet companies offering digital content directly to consumers. Morgan Stanley recently stated that only 22% of UK mobile subscribers browsed their service provider's portal in 2008, compared with 57% in 2007. And when it comes to a market that's predicted to be worth $40 billion by 2012 (with more than 50% of sales off-portal), that's a lot of revenue to miss out on.
Faced with this rather alarming off-portal trend, what share of the mobile Internet pie will actually be left for service providers?
Well, that will depend on overcoming a few significant challenges. For example, all kinds of businesses, (including service providers) want to mobilize their online services and storefronts – but can they find a way to do it more quickly? Right now, each service provider has its own on-boarding and certification process – much of which is done manually – which means, on average, that time to market takes longer than 30 days. Then once they've been "on-boarded", off-portal businesses need better ways to target and attract consumers, with customer acquisition costs averaging $15. Revenue leakage is also still a big problem for merchants and service providers alike, with about 30% getting lost in the process; and there's also often a delay in distributing revenues, with merchants typically waiting at least 90 days to receive their share of revenues from service providers.
However, despite all this, new research just released shows that the future could in fact be rather bright indeed – not just for service providers, but for the entire ecosystem – if service providers were to start taking specific steps to improve off-portal services and digital commerce. The new study shows that service providers still haven't unlocked the full potential of their networks, business systems and distribution channels and that global standards aren't yet being broadly embraced – each service provider seems to have its own service exposure or developer initiative. Examples of ways by which service providers could make a difference include providing open access across networks, as well as access to services such as higher throughput messaging for high-volume campaigns such as interactive TV (e.g. American Idol) and location services to improve their services and campaigns. Merchants also need access to billing, as well as better reporting visibility; and access to subscriber information could help them target their marketing efforts more efficiently. The research shows that with steps like these, direct-to-consumer businesses claim they could grow their mobile business by 50%, which in turn would mean more revenues for service providers. So the walled garden coming down might not turn out to be such a bad thing after all. 1
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