“Our industry is in the midst of a major and fundamental transformation. And that involves our business model,” says ITU Telecom Chairman A Reza Jafari, and reported by Luke Coleman, CommsDay writer. Among the biggest changes is mobility.

 

For anybody who makes a living on the fixed line network, and does not participate in mobility services, that is a bit troubling, and points out the extreme necessity of building new broadband services, including features and applications that interoperate with mobile services.

 

The greatest value proposition for mobile services is just that--mobility. Consumers and business users all over the world now clearly understand that voice in a pocket or a purse is better in many ways than voice at a place. That poses a clear risk of voice cannibalization on the fixed-line network.

 

And as mobile broadband access becomes a more-prevalent part of the service mix, that same process could happen in broadband services as well. Still, the greatest value proposition for a fixed network is broadband: gobs of bandwidth at prices mobile operations cannot match. Mobile operators will have constraints fixed networks do not have: radio ports and spectrum, for example.

 

Bandwidth consumption is a clear issue, of course. Any shift of streamed linear video from fixed to mobile modes will create high stress for mobile networks. But bandwidth is not the only issue. Interactive narrowband applications such as Citrix, Salesforce.com (News - Alert), virtual private networks and other applications requiring database dips might not consume much bandwidth, but they can tie up radio ports in ways that cause congestion and raise the odds of session blocking.

 

That is why it was so alarming that major telcos experienced such a drop in broadband net additions in the second quarter. If the fixed line business is ultimately going to be built around broadband, a service provider simply cannot fall behind in broadband accounts, as that provides the basis for video, voice and other revenue-generating services built on a broadband foundation.