What future for services?
Thursday, May 24th, 2012 by Roberto Saracco
I am here today at the TTM, the Technology Time Machine, organized by the IEEE where I have been chairing a panel on the Future of Service.
We have seen quite a change in telecommunications services in the last 10 years. In the last century (but that is just 12 years ago!) telecommunications services were strongly coupled with the infrastructure. Then the shift of intelligence to the edges (smarter terminals) and the transparency of the infrastructure led to a decoupling of services from the network. All of a sudden services were no longer confined by the network reach but have become global. The decreasing cost of sending bits have made the origination point irrelevant. From Kolkata you can provide a service to Cape Town. The world shrunk and the service providers multiplied to reach hundreds of thousands. The explosion of Apps are an evidence of this, as the services provided by Indian companies like Reliance to manage a network in the US from Mumbai.
There is here a weak win-win situation: Operators have seen an explosion of traffic driven by the increased number of services and service providers have seen an increased demand for services. It is a weak win however. Operators have lost their monopoly on services, actually they lost the service offering; the service providers are so many that only a few make significant money, most of them are barely cutting even and many are offering services without expecting revenues, further depressing the overall market.
The customer is a winner: there are so many cheap/free services to choose from. The reality is that of the 200 apps that might the present on a cell phone just a very few are actually used.
There is also a lose-lose situation: Operators have seen their cost for network upgrading increasing with uncertain revenues and service providers have a hard time to develop a money making service proposition, given the jungle and abundance of services.
Customers, as well, may be losing some of the quality they were used to. On the average, today’s customers have lowered their Quality Expectation and this makes, once again, a difficult selling proposition pricing for quality. Clearly some customers are willing to pay for guaranteed quality but they are just a minority. Besides, such a guarantee is getting more and more difficult to provide, given the spanning of a services over many networks a single Operator cannot control and involving resources that are not part, nor controlled by the network.
What can we expect in this decade and beyond? A crank back is unlikely. We are going to have even more networks in the future, each one controlled by a different party and actually so many of them, and sometimes so fleeting, that the establishment of old time inter-Operator agreements is not an option. We are going to see networks created by terminals, mesh networks, sensors networks, software defined networks, viral networks, bio-networks. You embed a chip, or even program a bacteria (we are in 2050) and you establish a communications through nearby bodies.
So many more networks on the horizon. So many that some radical change in management and communication paradigm is needed. My opinion is that such a change will derive not from planning and deployment, rather it will happen as an emergent property of the whole. Autonomic systems will dominate the landscape. The very concept of network is going to fade away, substituted by the concept of communication fabric.
Services will keep increasing in number but given the hundreds thousands we already have, does any increase make a difference? Am I going to feel it? Unlikely. But if I, and you, are not going to feel it it is even more unlikely that we are going to pay for them.
And still, they will keep growing. Hence, new biz models, new sustainability ways have to be found. As communications, sustainability is likely to become embedded in objects and in environments.
The same, I bet, will happen to services. That is the only way for accessing them. You cannot access a service you don’t know is there and with millions of them you will be unaware of most. But you, and I, will keep accessing objects around us, will keep living in our environment and interact with it. This interaction, more and more, will be service mediated. This is what the Internet of Things and WITH Things are all about. And this, to me, is the future.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:03 am
Roberto Minerva has spoken about networks and service, Operators and Providers. That’s normal. What is unusual is that he spoke about himself as a person and about his friends and it spoke in the sense that he as a person and his friends as his community are actually shaping the evolution of the communication fabric. We are no longer discussing about connectivity among nodes but connectivity as a fabric joining all players. And all players influencing connectivity and its evolution.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:09 am
Thomas Magedanz noticed that there are a number of enablers that are now in place, and being developed, that can lead to a reshaping of the connectivity fabric. Again we are going beyond a connectivity infrastructure and entering the realm of our relations with our world An example is smart city, an environment of connectivity fabric made up up connection links AND by Things (Internet of Things). The connectivity fabric is more than links and more than individual things connected. It is a brain and an orchestra, without a director, with areas like intelligent transportation loosely interacting with logistics, with smart buildings ….
As this connectivity fabric grows, as an emerging property of the whole environment, business opportunities arise and the focus shifts from connectivity revenues to service revenues and indirect revenues.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:21 am
Pasi Hurri presented a new way of thinking about services: no longer testing, no longer roll back…
Sound strange? Yes it does, but if the service world is evolving at such a speed that they keep changing every day the approach has to be different.
No more a network operating centre, rather hundreds of them focussing on local operation and making the most from what they perceive is the current environment.
He is also saying that many functions that required hardware ow are performed in software and this will be even more so in the future. Rather than having a car with wired performance, you can have a car that download software to change its performances over time. There are clearly security issues in this world where control is loosely imposed and the all environment evolves continuously. The Cloud is where the should of objects rest, be it a car or a building.
There is still need for hardware but the hardware loses its specifics. It is perceived as a whole where hw and services delivered are components with fading boundary.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:31 am
Franco Accordino is leading the digital future project with an horizon at 2050. But this fits with the session since it aims at inspiring 2020 policies.
The vision is being built through the interaction of many people, considering what is being done in research today and creating scenarios for 2040/50. What at that date: future enabling technology areas are ICT, Nano, Bio, Cogno in a quantum convergence. These will result in implanting embedded systems creating organic computing, quantum internet, bionics and cyborgs affecting bio-neuro-cogno-nano. That leads to trans-humanism, quasi immortality, balance resource sharing, body/mind adaptation, participative decision and so on. Some of these “names” are really poorly defined and are more a placeholder than a specific “thing”.
There are impotent questions that go across what is the space of potential evolution and that eventually will need to guide investment and therefore evolution itself.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:41 am
Each of us plays different roles as person and as user, a monad but also as part of a community. These different roles are complementary. Virtualization today is leading to software defined networks and people can in principle create their own “network”, when you are part of a community you create a network for that community, and so on…
May 24th, 2012 at 11:53 am
Maurizio Decina pointed out the importance of virtualization. These concepts were already addressed in the “cloud session”. It looks the way to go and an easy path. As a matter of fact interoperability issues are big and when can one hope to solve this issue once and forever? We have seen walled gardens, call it Apple/Google/…., are we going to stay with these walled garden or is there a way out of it?
Roberto M. observed that the market is asking for interoperability and if one starts from the business side one has the drive to come to a solution. It should be more about grids than (proprietary) clouds.
Pasi working in the TMN Forum has found that there are technical solutions to overcome the interoperability issue.
Thomas feels that monopolies are unavoidable, at the same time now there are technologies that can solve the interoperability issue, but is there really a request from the market to have it and have it in an economically sustainable way?
Franco takes an institutional point of view and focus on the rights of the (European) citizens. There is a tension between steering towards an open environment and steering towards competitiveness for the European players. The goal of a fair playing field requires interoperability.
May 24th, 2012 at 11:55 am
Roberto M tells that there are NO over the top, they are “at the edges”…. We need to go the internet way and support a network of networks each one being a single citizen…Technology has a role but the real difference is made by regulation…
May 24th, 2012 at 11:57 am
There has been a sequence of dominance, the Internet lends itself to the “winner takes it all” because of the low transaction cost and the fleeting stickiness of users coupled with the value of the network (Metcalfe law)
May 24th, 2012 at 12:04 pm
Regulation has looked at infrastructure and a few involved players what happens if we shift the attention to a multiplicity of players ending up to individual people?
Big initiates launched in research funding have to take the regulatory framework into account….
The FIPPP has this embedded.
Clearly if telephone numbers are owned by an Operator the implication is quite different from saying that the number is owned by the person using it…
May 24th, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Operators have been good in making money out of pipes, but they have not been good in creating services decoupled from the network. Can this scenario change in the future? According to Roberto M it is a matter of life or … disappearance.
Operators are still bounded by their networks and hence they cannot aiming at the global marketplace but to the fragment of it they reach with their network. Operators, as any players, are very good in their core market, better than Google. The problem is that the core market of Operators is declining….
May 24th, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Operators are starting to deploy Deep Packet inspection to maximize the user experience (they claim…). Is this really the way to go.
From an institution point of view (Franco – EU) there is a feeling and need to remain neutral….
There is a need to regulate the decoupling of services and network resources. This would avoid the creation of proprietary clouds and probably may circumvent the need for deep packet inspections since there can be a resource access negotiation.
May 24th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
In 1985 Europe won the world by pro ducting the GSM specification… now Europe has lost the battle in wireless; hence it should learn to fight on new battle field.