When Worlds Converge

The Google / Yahoo! Wild Card

Although cable companies, wireless carriers and telcos are the most obvious potential providers of converged wireline and wireless offerings, less traditional companies such as Google or Yahoo! also could get involved — perhaps as partners to service providers.

“Why not partner with them?” asked Jan Dawson, practice leader for wireline, wholesale and regulation for Ovum. Companies such as Google and Yahoo!, he said, “are good at making clients sit on a mobile device. Service providers could let them dip into customer records and a lot of the functionality that's built into telco networks to serve customers and take advantage of the unique information [carriers] have about customers.”

For example, he said, a social-networking application might be allowed to dip into a customer's list of recent calls to determine which of a customer's friends is using the service based on the friend's phone number.

“It could also tap into your phone-company-provided DVR to determine which TV shows you like to record and watch and serve up advertising or additional content based on those preferences,” Dawson said. “Or it could look up whether you are on the phone or not, whether your phone is switched on or off, whether you're online, etc., to display presence information to your friends and contacts.”

A partnership with a company such as Google or Yahoo! could be a means for a carrier that is lacking wireless or wireline infrastructure to better compete against integrated carriers or cable/wireless partnerships that are offering integrated services, Dawson said.