For the past ten or more years, the telecom industry has been playing catch-up with and worrying about “the Internet.” 

Communication Service Providers have looked enviously into the world of internet service providers and their ability to implement, deliver and innovate in their service portfolios in very short timescales.

 They’ve analyzed and assessed the way things are done and tried to square the circle of a network that is open to all to deliver services versus the closed and often proprietary world of telecoms.

Much money has been spent opening telecoms to third party service and content providers, whilst attempting to retain control over the core network to ensure that the service availability and responsiveness is not adversely impacted. Meanwhile, classic telecom services remain the core revenue earner for CSPs accounting for 90 or more percent of their revenues. CSPs have maintained their average revenue per month per user – or ARPU -- high by bringing the unit price of services down and piling on more and more bundled minutes, text messages and so forth.

But where is the innovation in telecoms services? Is the future of telecoms really only about third-party content?

Meanwhile, the major movers and shakers in internet-land have started to do some very interesting things using a technique called “mashups.” Suddenly, every website can add greater interactivity and utility by showing their location accurately on a map using mashup technology. And add dynamic information such as product stock levels, ticket availability and price, share price and stock movements and so forth.

Meanwhile, classic telecoms services remain just that. The services that everyone uses and values and pay for every month. But they are all the same. There is little to no service innovation in telecoms services. Due to the technical – and often proprietary – constraints of existing telecoms networks, historically it has been very hard to blend existing services together to create new and variant services based on their existing service portfolio. Service Brokers address this problem for both circuit-switched and packet-switched networks. Service Brokers provide mashup-type functionality for CSPs to create new and variant services by re-using their existing, proven services. This allows them to segment their customer base and to offer differentiated telecoms services that are pertinent to their customers.