By: Becky Bracken
Innovation isn’t just a science—it’s an art. You can’t force it and you can’t demand it from your employees, but in the communications technology space it’s what
separates the winners from the losers in very short order. From the old Ma Bell rotary phones to today’s most advanced self-organizing networks, great strides have been made thanks to
good old-fashioned research and development. Innovation incubators are the lifeblood of telecommunications companies, whose labs are tasked with creating the next
game-changing technologies…
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By: Becky Bracken
Big ideas always seem so simple in hindsight. Ontology's "Project Rothko" is one of those kind of elegant solutions. The big idea: When it comes to data, search, don't integrate. Just like
painter Mark Rothko's sweeping, ambitious works, to truly understand the data, one must take a large step backward and take in the entire scene. When Ontology officially unveiled Project
Rothko, otherwise known as version 4.0 of its semantic search platform, at Mobile World Congress in February, the announcement was made amid sessions devoted to buzz
topics like Big Data, BYOD (“bring your own device”), customer care, and real-time this and that…
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By: Becky Bracken
Listen, no one’s trying to talk mobile operators out of their enthusiasm for voice over LTE. There are incredible benefits to the technology, and it’s going to be huge—like, Seinfeld
huge.Someday. Voice over LTE, or VoLTE, enables rich communication services (RCS), which allow operators to compete head-to-head with over-the-top (OTT) players and
for voice to be billed as part of the larger data bundle. It’s also handy for international roaming, and from a communications service provider’s (CSP) perspective,
VoLTE will make it possible for voice services to be run on a network much like any other application—someday…
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By: Jesse Cryderman, Scott St. John,
Pipeline
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay, the computer scientist whose innovations inspired the design of Apple’s Lisa and Macintosh computers, among others In the
rapidly evolving digital universe, innovation is everything. Service and solution providers that peer beyond the horizon will end up sketching the shape of tomorrow, leaving
behind the companies that are happy to pursue old roads in search of new destinations…
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By: Charlie Thomas
The pressures facing communications service providers (CSPs) in the face of exponential data growth, from smartphones and increasingly connected devices to market saturation,
declining average revenue per user (ARPU), and new competitors with significant economic advantages, have created a classic case of “Is the glass half full or half empty?”The
market opportunity has never looked better, and CSPs stand to profit handsomely from the mobile explosion and the monetization of “all things connected…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
The word edge means different things to different people. Time is also a factor. In the Middle Ages, for instance, an edge was originally understood to be a
point or a sword before its definition grew to include “margin,” or “boundary.” Many centuries later, dreamers and entrepreneurs are obsessed with the cutting
edge, which has nothing to do with the number of blades Gillette is cramming onto its latest razor, while business executives and athletes are constantly looking for an edge,
i…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Over the past two decades telephone companies and pay-TV operators have evolved and abstracted to become communications service providers (CSPs). Now they’re transitioning into a new phase
of existence, as digital lifestyle providers. Inherent to this new identity is the concept that CSPs provide experiences, not simply connectivity, giving rise to the industry-wide
interest in customer experience management (CEM). Framing services and operations around the concept of experience delivery helps CSPs better leverage their unique assets while avoiding the
pitfalls of commodification…
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By: Jeffery Boozer
The age-old difficulty of achieving seamless fulfillment of IP-enabled unified communications (UC) products down channel is commonly caused by the inability
of communications service providers to holistically source services from their underlying supply chain of providers. In fact, the situation is only made
worse when CSPs realize that doing business and expanding service portfolios means they must endure new wholesale-supplier agreements; establish new processes to tie together
order management, billing and operational support systems (OSS); and ensure that new services and features are successfully enabled…
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By: Axel Clauberg, Hakan Millroth
Deploying network services in business today is growing more complex as new technologies are introduced at an accelerating rate and overall traffic increases. To help manage this
complexity, Deutsche Telekom’s TeraStream project has created an all-IP network transformation that can cope with exponential traffic growth and streamline the delivery of services
by leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) technology in its real-time operational support systems (OSS), allowing Deutsche Telekom to significantly reduce product innovation
cycles and instantly scale and deploy services…
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By: Andy Huckridge
Over the past few months I’ve spent a great deal of time discussing software-defined networking (SDN) with industry colleagues, analysts and journalists, and they all agree
that there’s a general lack of understanding about its benefits, flaws and potential to help communications service providers (CSPs). SDN promises to eliminate a large portion of a
network’s throughput and service-processing nodes, causing vast amounts of data to shift from one side of the network plane to another with much greater efficiency…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
T-Metro rises, Dish bids for Sprint Over the past few months there’s been considerable action in the US mobile market, but the biggest news is that T-Mobile and MetroPCS will combine
operations. MetroPCS shareholders have approved T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom’s final offer, and since all regulatory approvals have been secured, the merger of the two mobile operators
will be fast-tracked, and we mean fast—the companies targeted May 1 as their closing date, so by the time you read this, the deal will be done…
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By: Tim Young
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” —Andy Warhol Some people say that change is good. That’s nonsense, of course. What if, instead of sitting
at my desk and drinking a cup of coffee while writing this monthly message, I had decided to shout it into a microphone, with a thumping, synthetic techno beat in the
background, and embed the audio file for you here? I could also type it in Klingon or, better yet, handwrite thousands of copies before spritzing each
one with a bit of lavender perfume and mailing it to every subscriber…
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