Another interesting area in new services based on "old" stuff has to do with "smart" utilities such as smart electricity, gas and water grids. For example, Vodafone has recently won a contract in the UK to supply – at least initially – about 1 million SIM cards to deliver wireless connectivity for smart electricity meters. This is the first wave to replace all electricity and gas meters in the UK with smart meters. That's right; they've run out of people to sell mobile phones to, so they've started giving them out to inanimate objects! (By the way, that's why the fax machine got invented!)
All kidding aside, with 25 million households in the UK and many more in the U.S. and other countries experiencing so-called "saturation" of mobile markets, that's a lot of potential new network users reutilizing and repurposing existing technologies and investment.
None of these are the "killer app," but then I don't think there is a killer app out there — I think its lots and lots of new angles on fairly ordinary infrastructure, just done better, smarter and cheaper. And rather than being traditional telecom services, where the provider buys it, installs it, activates it and then charges and bills for it, the new wave of communications services generally involve partnerships and a lot of things — money, orders and more — flowing among parties in the value chain. And then of course we have the whole management issue as well.
That's why TM Forum has created its Enabling New Services initiative to get a handle on this B2B trading environment and take a close look at what appropriate standards are needed here. This isn't our first outing in this space by a long shot; we've been working on service delivery platforms, value chains and other components, albeit in a more isolated manner.
Now we're looking to bring it all together into a more structured environment to help our members address all of the issues that come up with new services that involve a lot of piece parts and, in some cases, a lot of different partners.
CSPs know they are so far from the days when voice was king and nothing stood between them and their customers. And unless they adapt to today's world of new services, they'll really lose out on a lot of potential business and may never be able to catch up again.
Keith Willets is chairman and CEO of TM Forum
This article originally appeared on TM Forum’s Inside Leadership newsletter