Still it's clear that while video is an important piece to the services-of-the-future puzzle it's not the only piece. In fact all of the 'legacy services' now offered have to be supplemented with successor concepts or their revenue stream will inevitably decline to near zero which would only increase the challenges new services would then face.
Content services have the advantage of consuming large amounts of bandwidth and with revenue per bit declining sharply (by 50% per year according to an EU provider) increasing the number of bits consumed is one approach. Unfortunately content services may be the only credible strategy that can support this simple remedy. Voice calling has long demonstrated virtually no price-demand elasticity and the same holds true for enterprise networking.
A good bit is a 'fat bit'
If increasing traffic isn't the way to create new-age non-video services what is‾ The emerging answer is what has become known as 'fat bits.' A fat bit is a service that adds features beyond simple connection and transport and so builds incremental customer value that can justify incremental customer payment. The industry has long known such services. In the 1970s they emerged as 'Custom Local Access Special Services' or CLASS which include regularly used features like call forwarding and caller ID. The issue today is how to develop successors to this early set of service enhancements for voice and to develop similar enhancements for other services.
Two general classes of 'service enhancements' appear to be available: 'facilitation' and 'substitution.' Facilitation enhancements seek to add value to a service by adding features that facilitate its use. Call forwarding is such an enhancement. It allows a call that would otherwise be 'ring-no-answer' and non-billable to be billed. Substitution enhancements seek to transfer some of the cost of using or supporting a service from the user to the provider in return for a fee. Managed services are an example of substitution services and they have been popular in Europe for decades and are gaining credibility in the U.S.
'Unified communications' is the best-known example of a facilitation-based enhanced service. The essential value proposition is to integrate voice (and video) communications more with collaborative processes and even with applications within an enterprise. This not only drives up value it also drives network usage. In data services facilitation enhancements have been used in electronic data interchange (EDI) in the past and have recently been tried in areas such as the publication of enterprise web services via a UDDI.
Issues in 'beyond-content' service enhancement
The common issue for network operators in either form of 'beyond-content' service enhancement is the increased reliance on feature hosting and software-based service and operations management and the need to couple hosted network intelligence with service signaling. Each of these generates its own special issues.
Hosted features introduce IT processes into modern network services as opposed to device-embedded processes of the type that drove voice service enhancements in the days of Class 5 switches. Five-nines reliability of network hardware is a popular (and almost universally achievable) benchmark but that same level of reliability is not at all common in the IT world. There are also significant voids in the management of hosted service components voids that bodies like the Telemanagement Forum (TMF) are working to fill.
Signaling is perhaps the most overlooked requirement of non-content services in all of modern networking. In telephony the signaling network has always been separated from the data plane (SS7).