As I get ready to make the journey from Austin to Dublin for the TM Forum’s Management World 2012 event, I’m scrolling through a few key checklist items in my mind: remember my passport, rationalize the need to pack sweaters as I sit here typing in a t-shirt and shorts, and think about what major topics or themes I’ll need to be on the look-out for at the show.
On the passport front, I’ve walked out of the house enough times without it on previous trips that it is already sitting in my travel bag waiting on me. I’ve already dug out my go-to sweater that’s been buried since, well, the last time I took a spring trip from Austin to Northern Europe, and while the premise of the TM Forum event is to provide somewhat of an active workshop to create solutions to current challenges, I feel fairly certain that this year will feature a near obsession with creating individualizing experiences for end users that results in better network monetization.
As a way of looking forward to what we might see this year in Dublin, I’m going to take a short look back at a conversation that I had with Grant Lenahan, executive director from Ericsson (Telcordia) at CTIA Wireless a few weeks ago in New Orleans.
In a nutshell, Grant pointed out that the next-generation of OSS/BSS software solutions need to act as an “intelligent traffic cop”, especially with respect to video, in order to interact with consumers in a way to give them a personalized experience from their telecom service provider.
The three basic tenets of effectively enabling this individualized experience are:
- Optimizing the network to use all available capacity at all times, as opposed to just at peak times.
- Creating Het Nets that combine the use of small cells, macro cells and wifi cells seamlessly.
- Implementing next-gen policy and charging software that can get each subscriber the bandwidth that they need for a particular application that they are running at a given time.
Figuring out the latter will be a key enabler to allow network operators to craft individualized pricing plans that can take advantage of purchase drivers on a per user basis.
Lenahan summarized this thrust by saying that the goal of next-gen OSS/BSS is to figure out, “How can I take 1,000 customized versions of a service, and permutations, and roll it out in a way that’s very efficient, agile, and allows people to effectively create their own services.”
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