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The Buzz About Multiple Play

The ICT industry is currently a buzz with the concept of multiple play, where voice, video and Internet services are combined on the same network and brought to the consumer’s home, over the same service delivery platform, removing the traditional boundaries that exist between fixed-line and wireless.

Dreamt of for years, the buzz around multiple play today is caused by the fact the technology is now actually here to deliver it. With the technologies underlying the Internet evolving further, improved infrastructure and speeds mean that high-speed access to content is now possible.

But behind all the hubbub over multiple play and the revenue building promise it brings to operators, questions exist concerning the practicalities of delivering these services, how to bill consumers for them, and how to regulate an environment where telecommunications, computing and broadcasting are all combined on one platform. How can the services best be regulated, priced and marketed? Now the enabling technology and the theory are here, the business model itself is the main focus. Making it work in the real world is the challenge operators and broadcasters face.

The promise of multiple play itself is simple – but it is as complex to build, manage and regulate as a DNA helix. Once assembled however, just as with any living organism, the potential for consumers is worth much more than the sum of the individual parts. Multiple play is the network backbone of the Digital Home – where a broadband IP-based network brings a world of entertainment, news and information to all members of a household, and where dozens of built-in computing and communication devices using sensors and RFID tags monitor and modify the surrounding environment in accordance with the needs of the household members.

While the Digital Home is the nirvana sought by the ICT industry, there is a sharp dose of reality when all the obstacles to achieving it are analysed in the cold light of day. Added complications are created by the regulatory conditions that differ from country to country, and the jostling for pole position between incumbent service providers who have a home advantage in their established customer base, and new market entrants that offer the attraction of competitive pricing. All see each other as competitors, as they scramble to offer customers new and innovative services that alter the way entertainment and information are accessed and consumed in the home.

Multiple Play Free-For-All

The rewards on offer in the battle for the consumer’s home are huge. It is the promise of cash tills ringing and subscriber bases exploding in volume that has telecommunication companies, cable TV companies and broadband service providers alike all competing to offer compelling services. The figures are compelling. The OECD reports that triple play is available from 48 different service providers in 23 of its 30 member states, with 10 economies having “quadruple play” services available.

This intensely competitive environment is in danger of creating a free-for-all where companies stand to gain or lose high stakes, and customers could end up faced with a confusing array of options and prices and conflicting standards that effectively deny them the life-changing potential of multiple play.

The challenge for companies supplying the market is reaching a consensus about the right technology that offers consumers the widest choice, at the lowest delivery cost per household. This challenge cannot be addressed wholeheartedly, however, or any consensus reached, by the main players involved as they are naturally acting in their own best interests and in the best interests of their own customers.

Colliding Worlds

Let’s take as an illustration three individual companies that are all experiencing the cut and thrust new world of converging services.

The company that traditionally had a monopoly on the one analogue telephone that might exist in each household, the Internet Service Provider company that set up 10 years ago with just an online presence to help it break the market, offering limitless access to all Internet content for a fixed price per month, and the company that began as a regional cable company and now reaches half the nation’s TVs via the ever expanding range of digital services it offers, are now all competing to gain control of the same piece of electronic equipment in the average household.

The three companies have been put in this position partly by the technological advances that mean that one piece of electronic equipment can be integrated with another, and partly in response to customers themselves, who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the benefits converged devices bring, and demanding in their desire to have access to them right here and now.

The fact that three such differing companies are all converging on the same area only serves to underline the need for a consensus to be reached about who has a right to offer which services and on which part of the network. This consensus though is just lip-service if the parties involved have to duke it out themselves.

New Services pose New Set of Challenges

For multiple play to become mainstream, and for this consensus to be reached, a number of issues need to be resolved, in terms of standards, technologies and price of services, as well as regulation.

The convergence between Internet protocol (IP), public switched telephone network (PSTN), digital subscriber line (DSL), cable television (CATV), wireless local area network (WLAN) and mobile technologies is a task that many believe is impossible without the development of global standards. To pave the way for multiple play to be easily accessible to consumers around the world, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is driving standards development efforts aimed at defining the building blocks of a new broadband global infrastructure.

Organizations also need to invest to ensure their networks are resilient enough to support the deployment of the new bandwidth-hungry services their customers are demanding, such as mobile TV, video-on-demand, VoIP and mobile gaming. The process of moving to a converged platform naturally poses a host of challenges for operators, ranging from the technical difficulties of integrating divergent technologies and standards to the service issues of integrating billing and customer service infrastructure. They also need to agree on service prioritization, or how voice and data traffic is handled, so that if networks become busy, there is no disturbance or degradation of the quality of service.

As a model which combines telecommunications, broadcasting and computing, multiple play presents a whole new set of challenges for regulators to address. Should multiple play services be promoted as fixed line, broadcasting or mobile, for example? And how should content be regulated, particularly if it is provided by operators outside the subscriber’s home country?

Critical Topic on the Agenda of Today’s ICT industry

As a topic that by its very nature concerns most of areas of the communications industry, multiple play is a major topic that will be discussed at ITU Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong. Industry experts at the event will highlight the challenges for companies supplying the market for multiple play, whether with regards to network capacity, pricing models or regulatory convergence.

As a global event, ITU Telecom World is an ideal forum to discuss the regulatory challenges of multiple play. Where multiple play brings an exciting array of new services and variety of content to consumers, the borderless world it creates also poses new challenges around the protection of consumers from harmful content, excessive advertising and access to adult content for minors.

A “multiple play” Forum session at the event will take a step back and analyse how multiple play is overturning existing business models and blurring existing regulatory boundaries. Speakers from OECD, Iliad, ZTE Corporation, PCCW, Alcatel, Cisco, ECI Telecom and Actelis Networks will discuss how companies can address the challenges multiple play brings and harness its potential. ITU ensures it is a forum where the issue of Multiple Play is ‘reality-checked’, raising the question of best practice in purchasing options and fostering debate on whether today’s technologies are flexible enough to supply what customers really want.

The nitty-gritty of how multiple play services can be delivered and billed to consumers is also addressed at Telecom World, with the concluding workshop of the Forum programme dealing with the small print of billing, payments and customer care. Billing can account for up to half of the cost of delivering a new service, with customer care accounting for much of the remainder. Multiple play demands careful attention to pricing, as operators need to avoid cannibalizing profitable revenue streams or making the service on offer to customers too complicated. Different price points apply in different economies, and it is not known whether consumers will wish to pay for multiple play services on a flat rate basis or to use it as an on-demand service.

The issues around multiple play are not only relevant to fully networked economies. The use of advanced network technologies can accelerate the bridging of the digital divide in developing economies. By the end of 2006, more than a quarter of a billion people worldwide will be connected to broadband networks of ever-increasing capacity. The goal of bringing broadband to all is more challenging in developing countries and in remote and rural areas, wireless networks can play a significant role. Multiple play is indeed a step beyond broadband and for it to bring benefits to developing countries the business model needs to be adapted to the conditions of the developing world. Mobile telephony took off in the developing world when pre-paid services were introduced – could a similar approach pave the way for adoption of multiple play services in the developing world?

Customer as king

ITU Telecom World 2006 is a platform where ITU will ensure the customer’s point of view remains in the picture as telecommunications companies, cable TV companies and broadband service providers all scramble to offer the perfect multiple play service.

In the heady days of the Internet boom, it was held that content was king. As multiple play spreads its wings, borne up on the technological advances that make it possible, it would seem that in a multiple-play world where broadcasters, telecommunications companies and service providers are all scrambling to offer consumers a combined service, the customer is king. A competitive market and the very opportunities that multiple play represents means we are entering a new era in which the consumer is champion, standing to gain entertainment, information and access to online communities at the touch of a button, at a price that reflects the power they hold.

What remains is the assembly of multiple play’s DNA helix. Streamlining the billing and payment infrastructure. Ensuring pricing is at the right level. Providing a wide range of content. Solving the regulatory issues that arise from multiple play in markets around the world. And finally, managing the multiple play environment effectively so that consumers benefit from all the possibilities of multiple play but are protected from any dangers that lurk in the Wild West frontiers of this borderless world.

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