But it’s the inexorable rise, and more importantly the intersection, of three big trends that test the ambition of the service factory: mobility, personalization and content.

Revisiting the Service Factory

Communications service providers are looking to satisfy individual customer demands for ever more complex services and bundles. We are making services more interactive and personalized. The more options we give consumers, and the more options we have in the network to deliver that customer experience, the exponentially more complex service provisioning and operations become.

In wireless, service provisioning is no longer just an entry in a Home Location Register. Fulfillment will increasingly be about assembling service configurations and managing disparate service components that affect one another, which in turn will leverage automation and componentization to allow mass customization of low-volume (but abundant), long-tail services.

Wireless operators enjoy a service-/ parameter-based style of provisioning, completely separated from the underlying technology and physicality of the supporting network. Fulfillment in wireline is still largely characterized by circuit facility-based ordering - a necessity for the many networks reliant on TDM and point-to-point connectivity. But wireline broadband bundles and supply chains still presage the complexity and interdependence that wireless will face as more interactive services are added. A customer adding SMS might not impact the voice plan that they were on, or the underlying IT required to make that change. But

Content Delivery

A mobile operator wishes to provide premium mobile content that is intended to increase uptake and ARPU: video on demand, streaming television, gaming, and hosted/cloud based applications (email, collaboration services). The content could be delivered via multiple wireless networks available: 3G, 4G, WiFi hotspots. Services would be offered as best effort and/or premium managed quality. The customer has the ability to assemble custom bundles out of a prescribed catalog and pricing based on consumption of content and/or data usage fees. Catalog offers variables listed below, including optional advertising supported plans to reduce cost of premium content, with “opt-in” features that affect the nature of ads, the number and their discounts for content. Family plans are also offered, with allowances tied to parental controls and self-serve thresholds. Choosing an option would be dependent on underlying services (e.g., no parental control unless the base content delivery service was ordered).