Wireless carriers made it clear at this week’s Mobile World Congress that they are feeling squeezed by “over-the-top” content providers. The cost of building and upgrading networks to support exploding data traffic is not shared by companies like Google, Facebook and Netflix, although AT&T said this week that it’s working on a plan that would make content providers help pick up the tab.
For companies that sell equipment and services to carriers, the pressure from OTT players presents an opportunity.
For mobile customers, the most important content is usually personal content, so software companies are working to offer services that connect carriers to that content. Ireland’s Newbay, recently acquired by RIM for $100 million, demonstrated a white label solution at Mobile World Congress that enables users to store all the content on their phones in the cloud.
Meanwhile creative infrastructure suppliers are finding ways to leverage their engineering competencies and their customer relationships to offer carriers value added services that they can brand as their own and deliver to end users.
GENBAND is at the forefront of this trend. The Texas-based IP infrastructure provider announced a slew of new products and services at Mobile World Congress, all aimed at helping carriers upsell and retain their customers. Its Mobile Life application unifies video conferencing, SMS, email, social networks, calendar, photos, music and remote control of household devices including the television. The company is also offering carriers a solution that lets user personalize their data plan in real-time, in order to buy more bandwidth as needed. “A pop-up will come up and tell the customer they are using a lot of bandwidth,” explains GENBAND’s director of product marketing, Sanjay Bhatia. “Then the consumer can actually personalize their broadband settings on demand and get extra throughput for the duration of that activity. This allows mobile operators to gain business intelligence and take policy actions.”
Orange Business Services is working with GENBAND to facilitate stock trades for more 2,000 enterprise customers. GENBAND’s software developers created a Stock Trader Alert that connects brokers and traders when securities hit certain price points. The Open Trade solution uses the GENBAND A2 platform’s APIs embedded on Orange’s financial extranet as a private cloud-based application server.
Want your news faster? Follow me on Twitter.
