Convergence Today: What Tier 1 Carriers Are Offering

We in the telecommunications industry spend a lot of time pontificating about the future — particularly when it comes to the subject of convergence. But what exactly are the Tier 1 carriers offering today in terms of converged services (even if the infrastructure behind them is not converged)? The answer, in short, is not much. However, there is some early movement on the converged service front. Let’s take a look at who’s doing what.

AT&T
You may recall that AT&T Inc. made a splash at last year’s NXTcomm event when Randall Stephenson during his keynote address introduced the launch of a new service called Video Share.

A year later, when you ask AT&T execs what converged services the company offers, Video Share is the main answer. Video Share allows users to send a live video stream to a recipient during a standard cellular voice call.

However, the nation’s No. 1 telco is also at the center of the convergence movement as a result of its relationship with Apple, which named AT&T the exclusive provider of service for the iPhone, a multimedia device that allows users to access video and a whole lot more. AT&T’s service for the iPhone today is based on 2.5G EDGE, will be 3G later this year, and move to LTE around 2010/11, the company tells xchange.

On the wireless business services front, AT&T Wireless today offers an IP PBX-based service that provides users with a single number for both their wireline and wireless phones. The company is in the process of building a similar service, in this case based on femtocell technology, for the consumer space, said Chris Rice, executive vice president of Shared Services. Also in the offing is a network-based cellular address book to enable users to more easily upgrade to new devices (so they don’t have to reprogram new cell phones or PDAs), he said.

On the IPTV front, AT&T’s U-verse subscribers are able to pull up Internet-based content, such as Flickr photos, on their TVs. Pretty basic stuff, the likes of which Apple TV can do today for around $300 and no monthly service fees.

AT&T also promotes its own branded Blue Room music Web site through which wireline or wireless broadband customers can watch interviews, music videos and more.

Of course, AT&T does like to talk about its three-screen strategy. Company executives keep bringing up the concept of enabling users to program their TV DVRs remotely via cell phone, or continue watching a TV program on their mobile device if they need to leave the house. But, in truth, AT&T’s video efforts today largely are running on separate rails on the wireless, wireline broadband/Internet and TV fronts.

While AT&T’s wireless, Internet and TV video services are separate today, Rice said the goal is to provide subscribers with a more unified experience across the three screens. To make that happen, he added, AT&T needs to build back-end systems to enable that, a task he expects to take a couple of years.

Making video communications more personal is another goal at AT&T, he added. For example, he said, the company has an application in the lab that allows users to create avatars in virtual movie theaters and then comment on the movie. (Think: Mystery Science Theater 300.)

BT
BT, perhaps largely due to its own publicity machine, has arguably become king of convergence. But that lofty position has had its challenges, as the company’s early passes at convergence — such as its BT Fusion effort — have been reported to be slow starters. And the company, which this spring saw a turnover at the CEO level, has been struggling financially.

The company is known for its much-hyped 21st Century Network, which actually involves most of the same basic technologies many other service providers have embraced, such as Ethernet, IP/VoIP, next-generation service delivery platforms (BT calls this its Converged Experience Design Notation initiative), etc.

“We have re-built around 35 percent of the U.K. infrastructure while, globally, the 21CN platform is now available in 164 countries and on towards 170 countries during 2008, with 21CN I-Nodes now available in 31 locations across 26 countries supporting corporate voice-over-IP services,” said BT CTO Matt Bross.

“Our real-life implementation experience of migrating end users has made us prioritize the delivery of new services like Ethernet and next-generation broadband ahead of migrating existing services,” he added. “This has been an important lesson. We’re in the process of launching a range of new 21CN services this year.

“In January, we launched 21CN Ethernet and this spring,” Bross continued, “we'll launch 21CN Broadband which, in addition to higher speeds, will give end users greater choice and improved quality of experience. We'll also launch an integrated voice and broadband service later this year that will enable high-definition sound for voice services for the first time.”

As for converged services, the company offers BT Vision, Fusion and Digital Vault as part of what it calls an integrated broadband solution.

“For business customers, we’ve created BT Office Anywhere, a Wi-Fi smartphone device with a Windows operating system, which allows workers to e-mail and access calendars and contacts in real time as well as download and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents,” said Bross in an interview via e-mail. “For consumers, we’ve worked with Sony so that Sony PSP users can use Go!Messenger, the new wireless communications package on their gaming device, to chat to and see their friends.

“We’re seeing new public applications as part of BT’s Wireless Cities program, such as free information zones on council Web sites for residents, workers and visitors,” he added. “Our MobileXpress service is a scalable, cost-effective solution [that] provides remote access for multinational [corporations]. BT Corporate Fusion is also helping our corporate customers improve workforce productivity by giving employees a single device for communicating inside and outside the office with a single point of access to key communication services.”

One hallmark of BT’s approach to convergence seems to be its move toward opening the network to the developer community at large. While this Web 2.0-type theme is discussed across the communications industry, BT actually has publicly committed to it.

“We will introduce an Innovation platform this summer that will enable BT and third parties to add value to BT's new 21CN services through the development, integration and delivery of a range of software applications,” said Bross.

Qwest
Convergence may be ill-defined; nonetheless, when you think about a cutting-edge concept liked converged services, Qwest Communications International Inc. is not the first telco that comes to mind. But even this ILEC has been busy working on converged services.

Qwest now is trialing in parts of Colorado a new service called qHome, which brings together communications and messaging across wireline and wireless devices, and delivers some other fun little features.

The service, which is based on Microsoft’s Live Messenger, provides all of a customer’s voice mail and e-mail through a single interface that can be accessed via a PC or wireless device. It also allows the user to log into Messenger from anywhere in the world to see who has called his or her other devices, such as the home phone. Subscribers also can save voice mails as MP3 files for replay. (For example, Mike Gibson, Qwest’s director of intelligent networking, who gave xchange an exclusive look at qHome in late April, demonstrated how he’d used this last feature to save a voice mail message sent on Halloween from his young daughter.)

While qHome employs newer technologies like SIP and Parlay within what Qwest CTO Pieter Poll described as a “pre-IMS” architecture, the voice component of it is TDM as opposed to VoIP, said Gibson. “Everyone talks about new services,” he added, “but in some cases it’s about simplifying existing services.”

But beyond just being a nifty new service, which Qwest intends to deliver as a free feature included with consumer bundles to customers it’s transitioning from its old voice mail system, qHome represents the first service built on a new framework that will act as the foundation for Qwest’s future converged services, said Gibson.

In bringing new services to market, Qwest and the other telcos traditionally have set the specifications for the service, put out a vendor request for proposals, chosen equipment to support the service, deployed that gear and then brought the service to market — all in a one-off basis, noted Gibson. With qHome, the platform was created with a broad range of services and capabilities in mind, he added. For example, Qwest hinted that it may elect to bring a video component to the service in the future.

The move to create this platform began a couple years ago when Gibson, who initially was on the IT side at Qwest, was tapped along with a handful of other folks — some from IT and others from the network side — to work on the convergence effort, he said.

Verizon
Verizon Communications Inc. over the past several years has been surprisingly forward-thinking about network infrastructure and services.

It’s spending billions on its network and really stuck its neck out with the FiOS FTTH project at a time when AT&T embraced a more conservative FTTN approach and Qwest was nowhere to be found in terms of fiber-based residential initiatives. And although it may have iPhone envy (it offers an iPhone copycat), Verizon Wireless preceded Apple in the introduction of a cell phone MP3 player and accompanying music Web site.

However, when you ask Mark Wegleitner, senior vice president of technology at Verizon Communications, what converged services the company offers today, he doesn’t have a lot to talk about. His only example in an interview with xchange in April was the fact that FiOS TV customers can pull up basic information such as weather and sports from the Internet via an application he referred to as widgets.

In the labs, however, Verizon is doing lots of work on cross-platform gaming, such as allowing an individual working off a set-top box to play against someone on his or her cell phone. Wegleitner said Verizon expects to introduce something along these lines this year or early next. He also talked a bit about IMS-based presence allowing callers and called parties to more effectively communicate and manage their services through TV-based call alert pop-ups, for example.

Perhaps Verizon’s converged services are so limited because, as Wegleitner said, the services Verizon does offer in that vein are provided in silo fashion. “It’s really the perception of the consumer that you’ve got a converged service, which is, from a market-based perspective, equally effective,” he said. “But it’s not necessarily the most cost-effective way from the network perspective.”

Wegleitner said an important part of his job at Verizon is to ensure that the money spent on its multibillion-dollar construction program is put to best use. “Strategically, converged networks and converged services will be very high in the priority list of how we spend that money,” he said, adding that Verizon expects true convergence (a la ATIS) to result in at least a 50 percent gain in efficiency over the next four to six years in terms of increased services and better time-to-market.

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