Thoughts in motion

Like most of the telecom world, I spent the month of October bouncing from one city to the next, listening to trade show keynotes, walking exhibit floors, and talking with product managers and marketing directors, almost to the point where everything started to blur together. But from that month of movement, a few specific moments stand out. That's not to say this is absolutely the best of what I heard in my travels, but it's what stuck with me.

Quality of experience is the new driver for service providers, even though it's not completely clear that everyone agrees what that is, or how it will be measured or determined. At minimum, it means keeping customers happy, an old-fashioned concept for our brave new world. Lyn Cantor, vice president of marketing for Tektronix, probably best gauged the impact of this phenomenon on service providers when he pointed out, in a speech at Telephony's IPTV Workshop, that it once was OK to build highly reliable networks at five-nines. Then, in the era of data services, customers demanded service level agreements, and quality of service replaced quality networks. Now, to deliver video and multimedia, it's quality of experience.

Context is also a new driver, and again, it's not all that well-defined other than as a mash-up of identity, presence, recent activity and geographic location. Dan Hesse, CEO of Embarq, pointed out in a VON keynote that delivering content in context means providing consumers with what they need, when they need it. That service is one way to rescue the advertising model, by targeting ads so specifically that almost no consumer will use available technology to avoid them.

Privacy is an item that is in total flux. There is a generation of computer users that offers intimate details of their lives via social networking sites and isn't always concerned enough about who sees them. I suspect this same generation would be aghast at a potential new service called Family Finder that Peter Hill, vice president of voice and converged services for AT&T, previewed at TelcoTV. It would let Mom or Dad turn on the TV and see immediately, based on GPS tracking of cell phones, where the kids are.

Context and ad targeting also are based, to a very great extent, on not only knowing things about your consumers but on possibly storing that information for later reference. As my colleague Rich Karpinski notes on page 16, some Internet companies are getting away with that, but telecom service providers might not be so fortunate.

Finally, IPTV is apparently ready to scale and prepared to bust out all over in new applications that will revolutionize our living rooms. Sorry — I can't list all the folks who told me that, but trust me, I heard it often.