Voice: So much more than Phone Calls

 [Originally published on LinkedIn. Please subscribe to my new LinkedIn Newsletter here]

Trivia Question: When was the first example of network-based music streaming launched?

I'll bet many of you guessed that it was Spotify in 2006, or Pandora in 2000. Maybe some of you guessed RealAudio, back in 1995.

But the actual answer is over a century earlier. It was the Théâtrophone, first demonstrated in 1881 in Paris, with commercial services around Europe from 1890. It allowed people to listen to concerts or operas with a telephone handset, from another location across town. It even supported stereo audio, using a headset. It finally went out of business in the 1930s, killed by radio. Although by then, another form of remote audio streaming - Muzak, delivering cabled background music for shops and elevators - was also popular.

Why is this important? Because these services used "remote sound" (from the Greek tele+phonos) over networks. They were voice/audio communications services.

Yet they were not "phone calls".

Over the last century, we've started to use the words "voice communications", "telephony" and "phone calls" interchangeably, especially in the telecoms industry. But they're actually different. We often talk about "voice" services being a core component of today's fixed and mobile operators' service portfolios.

But actually, most telcos just do phone calls, not voice in general. One specific service, out of a voice universe of hundreds or thousands of possibilities. And a clunky, awkward service at that - one designed 100+ years ago for fixed networks, or 30+ years ago for mobile networks.

*Phone rings, interrupting me*

"Hello?"

"Oh, is that Dean Bubley?"

"Yes, that's me"

"Hi, I'm from Company X. How are you today?"

"I'm fine, thanks. How can I help you?"

... and so on.

It's unnatural, interruptive and often unwanted. A few years ago a 20-something told me some words of wisdom "The only people who phone me are my parents, or people I don't want to talk to". He's pretty much right. Lots of people hate unsolicited calls, especially from withheld numbers. They'll leave their phones on silent. (They also hate voicemails even more).

I used to go into meetings at operators and ask them "Why do people make phone calls? Give me the top 10 reasons". I'd usually get "to speak to someone" as an answer. Or maybe a split between B2B and B2C. But never a list of actual reasons - "calling a doctor", "chatting to a relative", "politely speaking to an acquaintance but wishing they'd get to the point".

Now don't get me wrong - ad-hoc, unscheduled phone calls can still be very useful. Person A calling Person B for X minutes is not entirely obsolete. It's been good to speak to friends and relative during lockdown, or a doctor, or a bank or prospective client. There's a lot of interactions where we don't have an app to coordinate timings, or an email address to schedule a Zoom call.

But overall, the phone call is declining in utility and popularity. It's an undifferentiated, lowest-common denominator form of communications, with some serious downsides. Yet it's viewed as ubiquitous and somehow "official". Why do web forms always insist on a number, when you never want to receive a call from that organisation?

Partly this relates to history and regulation - governments impose universal service obligations, release numbering, collect stats & make regulations about minutes (volume or price), determine interconnect and wholesale rates and so on. In turn, that has driven revenues for quite a lot of the telecom industry - and defined pricing plans.

But it's a poor product. There are no fine-grained controls - perhaps turning up the background noise-cancellation for a call from a busy street, and turning it down on a beach so a friend can hear the waves crashing on the shore. There's no easy one-click "report as spam" button. I can't give cold-callers a score for relevance, or see their "interruption reputation" stats. I can't thread phone calls into a conversation. Yes, there's some wizardry that can be done with cPaaS (comms platforms-as-a-service) but that takes us beyond telephony and the realm of the operators.

Beyond that, there's a whole wider universe of non-call voice (and audio) applications that operators don't even consider, or perhaps only a few. For instance:

• Easy audioconferencing
• Push-to-talk
• Voice-to-text transcription (for consumers)
• Voice analytics (e.g. for behavioural cues)
• Voice collaboration
• Voice assistants (like Alexa)
• Audio streaming
• Podcasts
• Karaoke
• One-way voice / one-way video (eg for a doorbell)
• Telecare and remote intercom functions for elderly people
• Telemedicine with sensor integration (eg ultrasound)
• IoT integrations (from elevator alarms to smartwatches)
• "Whisper mode" or "Barge-in" for 3-person calls
• Stereo
• De-accenting
• Voice biometric security
• Data-over-sound
• In-game voice with 3D-positioning
• Veterinary applications - who says voices need to be human?

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of possibilities. Some could be blended with a "call" model, while others have completely different user-interaction models. Certain of these functions are implemented in contact-centre and enterprise UCaaS systems, but others don't really fit well with the call/session metaphor of voice.

I've talked about contextual communications in the past, especially with WebRTC as an enabling technology, which allows voice/video elements to be integrated into apps and browser pages. I've also written before about the IoT integration opportunities - something which is only now starting to pick up (Disclosure: I'm currently working with specialist platform provider iotcomms.io to describe "people to process" and event-triggered communications).

But what irritates me is that the mainstream telecoms industry has just totally abdicated its role as a provider and innovator of voice services and applications. You only have to look at the mobile industry currently talking about Vo5G ("5G Voice") as a supposed evolution from the VoLTE system used with 4G. It's basically the same thing - phone calls - that we've had for over 100 years on fixed networks, and 30 years on mobile. It's still focused on IMS as a platform, dedicated QoS metrics, roaming, interconnection and so on. But it's still exactly the same boring, clunky, obsolescent model of "calls".

There was a golden opportunity to rethink everything for 5G and say "Hey, what *is* this voice thing in the 2020s? What do people actually want to use voice communications *for*? What interaction models and use-cases? What would make it broader & more general-purpose?" In fact, I said exactly the same thing around 10 years ago, when VoLTE was being dreamed up.

Nothing's changed, except better codecs (although HD voice was around on 3G) and lame attempts to integrate it with the even-worse ViLTE video and perennially-useless RCS messaging functions. The focus is on interoperability, not utility. Interop & interconnection is a nice-to-have for communications. Users need to actually like the thing first.

Some of the vendors pay lip-service to device integration and IoT. But unless you can tune the underlying user interface, codecs, acoustic parameters, audio processing, numbering/identity and 100 other variables in some sort of cPaaS, it's useless.

I don't want a phone call on a smartwatch - I want an ad-hoc voice-chat with a friend to ask what beer he wants when I'm at the bar. I want tap-to-record-and-upload of conversations, from my sunglasses, when someone's trying to sell me something & I suspect they're scamming me. I want realtime audio-effects like an audio Instagram filter that make me sound like I'm a cartoon character, or 007. (I don't want karaoke, but I imagine millions do)

So remember: the telecoms industry doesn't do "voice". It just does one or two voice applications. VoLTE is actually ToLTE. It's not too late - but telcos and their suppliers need to take a much broader view of voice than just interoperable PSTN-type phone calls. Maybe start with Théâtrophone 2.0?

This post was first published via my LinkedIn Newsletter - see here + also the comment stream on LI

#voice #telecoms #volte #phone #telephony #IMS #VoLTE #telcos #cPaaS #conferencing

If you're interested in revisiting your voice strategy, get in touch via email or LinkedIn, to discuss projects, workshops and speaking engagements. We can even discuss it by phone, if you insist.

Sources of value in voice: Asking the right questions

In the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of work on voice communications (and messaging / video / context):

• I attended Enterprise Connect in Orlando discussing collaboration, UCaaS, cPaaS, WebRTC and related themes
• I spoke at a private workshop, for a Tier-1 operator group's communications-service internal experts team
• I've helped a client advise a strategy around the new European eCall in-vehicle emergency-call standard
• I've been writing a report on VoLTE adoption and impact, for my Future of the Network research stream published by STL Partners / Telco 2.0 (Subscribe! Link here)

A common, over-arching, theme is starting to form for me. The future sources of value in voice are all about SPs / vendors asking the right questions when they design new services and solutions.

Historically, most value in voice communications has come from telephony (Sidenote: voice is 1000 applications/functions. Phone calls are merely one of these). And in particular, the revenue has stemmed from answering the following:

• Who is calling?
• Where are they?
• Who is being called?
• Where are they?
• How long did they speak for?
• Plus (sometimes):
• When did they call?
• What networks were they on?
• Was the call high-quality? (drops, glitches etc)
• Is it an emergency?

This pretty much covers most permutations for ordinary phone calls: on-net/off-net, roaming, international and long-distance, fixed-to-mobile and so forth. 

Clearly, the answers to these questions are worth a lot of money: many billions of dollars. But equally clearly, they don't seem to be enough to protect the industry from competition and substitution from other voice-comms providers, or alternative ways of conducting conversations and transactions. As a result, voice telephony services are (mostly) being bundled as flat-rate offers into data-led bundles for consumers, or perhaps per-month/per-seat fees for unified comms (or SIP trunks) for business. 

In other words, current voice revenues are being delivered based on answering fewer questions than in the past. Unsurprisingly, this is not helping to defend the voice business.

The current "mainstream" telecoms industry seems to be focused only on adding a few more questions to the voice roster:

• Is it VoIP / VoLTE / VoWiFi? (Answer = sometimes, but "so what" for the customer?)
• Can we use it to drag through RCS? (Answer = No)
• How can we reduce the costs of implementation? (Answer = maybe NFV/cloud)
• Are there special versions for emergencies? (Answer = yes, eg MCPTT and eCall)
• Is there a role for CSPs in business UCaaS? (Answer = yes, but it's hard to differentiate against Microsoft, Cisco, RingCentral, Vonage and 100 others)
• What do we do about Amazon Echo? (Answer = "Errrrmmmm... chatbots?")

Given the huge expense and complexity involved in implementing IMS for VoLTE, many mobile operators have very little "bandwidth" left to think about genuine voice innovation, especially given wider emphasis on NFV. What limited resources are left may get squandered on RCS or "video-calling". 

Fixed and cable operators are in a slightly better position - they have long had hybrid business models partnering with PBX/UC vendors for businesses and can monetise various solutions, especially where they bundle with enterprise connectivity. For fixed home telephony, most operators have long viewed basic calls as a commodity, and are either protected by regulators via line-rental and emergency-call requirements, or can outsource provision to third parties.

In my view, there are many other questions that can be asked and answered - and that is where the value lies for the future of voice communications. None are easy to achieve, but then they wouldn't be valuable if they were:

• Why is the call occurring? (To buy something, ask a question, catch up with a friend, arrange a meeting or 100 other underlying purposes)
• Where is the call being made and received (physically)? For instance indoors, in a noisy bar, on a beach with crashing waves, in a car, in a location with eavesdroppers?
• Is the communication embedded in an app, website or business process? 
• Is the call part of an ongoing (multi-occasion) conversation or relationship?
• Is a "call" the right format, with interruptive ringing and no pre-announcement? Is a push-to-talk, one-way, "whisper mode", broadcast, team or other form more appropriate?
• Are both/all parties human, or is a machine involved as well?
• What device(s) are being used? (eg headset, car, wearable, TV, Echo, whiteboard?)
• Who gets to record the call, and own/delete/transcribe the recording?
• Are the call records secure, and can they be tampered with?
• What's the most effective style of the call? (Business-like, genial, brusque, get-to-the-point-quickly etc)
• What languages and accents are being spoken? Can these be adjusted for better understanding? What about background noise - is that helpful or hindering?
• Can the call add/drop other parties? Are these pre-arranged, or can they be suggested by the system in context?
• Are the participants displaying emotion? (Happiness, anger, eagerness, impatience, boredom etc) . How can this be measured, and if necessary, managed?
• Is there a role for ultrasound and/or data-over-sound signalling before or during the call?
• How can the call be better scheduled / postponed / rescheduled?
• Is a normal phone number the best "identifier"? What about a different number, or a social / enterprise / gaming / secure identity?
• Are there multiple networks involved/available for connection, or just one? What happens when there are multiple choices of access or transit providers? What happens where the last 10m is over WiFi or Bluetooth beyond the SP's visibility?
• Is encryption needed? Whose?
• What solutions are needed to meet the needs of specific vertical-markets or other user groups? (Banking, healthcare, hospitality, gaming etc)
• What are the desired/undesired psychological effects of the communications event? How can the user interface and experience by improved?
• Did the call meet the underlying objectives of all parties? How could a similar call be improved the next time?
• How do we track, monetise and bill any of this?

In my view it is these - and many other - questions that determines the real value of voice communications. Codec choice and network QoS are certainly useful, as is (sometimes) interoperability. Network coverage is clearly paramount for mobile communications. But these should not be put on a pedestal, above all the other ways in which value can be derived from something seemingly simple - people speaking to each other.

I'm seeing various answers to some of these questions - for example, contact-centre solutions seem to be most advanced on some of the emotional analysis, language-detection and other aspects. There are some interesting human-driven psychology considerations being built into new codec designs like EVS (eg uncomfortable silences between words). MVNOs and cPaaS players are doing cool things to "program" telephony for different applications and devices. The notion of "hypervoice" was a good start, but hasn't had the traction it deserved (link). Machine-learning is being applied to help answer some of these questions - most obviously with Alexa/Siri/Assistant voice products, but also behind the scenes in some UC and contact-centre applications.

But we still lack any consistent recognition that voice is "more than calls". 99% of effort still seems to go on "person A calls person B for X minutes". Very little is being done around intention and purpose - ask a CSP "Why do people make phone calls?" and most can't give a list of the top-10 uses for a "minute". Most people still use "voice" and "telephony" synonymously - a sure-fire indicator they don't understand the depth of possibility here. And we still get hung up on replacing voice with video (they have a Venn overlap, but most uses are still voice-centric or video-centric).

Until both the telco and traditional enterprise solutions marketplaces expand their views of voice (and entrench that vision among employees, vendors and partners), we should continue to expect Internet- and IoT-based innovators to accelerate past the humble, 140yr-old phone call. Start asking the right questions, and look for ways to provide answers.

SaaS & UCaaS - aiming for Enterprise Eyeballs

I'm at Enterprise Connect in Orlando this week, talking to people about trends in business communications, notably UC, conferencing, cPaaS and contact centres. I'm curious to see the current real-world adoption of WebRTC, shifts around enterprise mobility/wireless, integration with VoLTE, and adjacent technologies such as SD-WAN, machine-learning and IoT integration.

One unexpected thing has become clear from Day 1: the enterprise market is following the consumer web insofar as every vendor and service provider wants to maximise share of users' attention, or "eyeballs".

While in the consumer world, this is all about advertising and data - spending hours on Facebook translates to more chances to see ads, as with TV - in the business world it's a bit different. 

Because software has license fees or XaaS subscription revenues, all the vendors want to create "platforms" in which customers' employees "spend their day", at least when they're in front of a PC or mobile device. More time potentially equates for higher per-seat fees, plus more chance for selling extra modules of software.

So a UC or UCaaS provider wants to be the hub for calls, chat, conferencing, collaboration, "enterprise social", customer interation, productivity and so forth. Cisco, Broadsoft, RingCentral, even Amazon with its new Chime app, all have pretensions to being where you spend hours a day "doing work". 

An office suite provider like Microsoft wants the same thing - you should be sending emails and doing presentations, and communicating from there. One speaker today described workers having different "jumping-off points" for setting up meetings or collaborating. One employee might have a Salesforce interaction as a trigger, others could be inside Slack or Outlook or a call-centre front-end (or various vertical-specific applications).

Obviously many jobs only have a few minutes a day in front of a screen or on a phone, but others (knowledge workers) involve hours. There's probably a big-data and machine-learning play emerging here as well, where increased eyeball-minutes can yield insights into worker productivity and process efficiency. Arguably Google scores extra points here too, if you're logged in and using Chrome for some of your work.

As far as I know there's no business-world equivalent of TV viewing-habits or web-browsing statistics. But there's certainly a rush for different vendors and XaaS providers to drive up their ratings. I expect we'll see a much broader focus on "enterprise eyeballs" through 2017 and beyond.

EDIT: A good point from a commenter on my LinkedIn, that other players here are workflow & ERP providers. A lot of people will "live" primarily in SAP, Oracle etc during their day - those could also be the hub for UC and collaboration as well. Also, for the consumer space, ComScore have just published research (link) on how people spend their "digital minutes" (ugh, horrible expression) - a business-user version would be fascinating.

Facebook Workplace: Just collaboration, or parking its tanks on UCaaS & cPaaS lawns?

Facebook has finally launched its enterprise collaboration offering, changing its name to Workplace, from the original beta-tested Facebook at Work (link). It certainly isn't a full UCaaS product - but it wouldn't surprise me if it heads (somewhat) in that direction over time, or adds in integration or PaaS capabilities that allow it to compete indirectly in future.

It's aggressively priced, and mostly targetted at the Slack-style market for timeline- and messaging-centric collaboration, also known as WCC (workstream collaboration & communication). It's got a free trial, it's free for educational users, and for businesses it costs just $1-3 per month depending on size of deployment. (For comparison, Facebook's global consumer ARPU is around 4, mainly from advertising, although this is much higher in North America - link).

Clearly, it's majoring on large similarity in user-experience to its social networking platform, which is familiar to a large % of humanity. Likes, reactions, groups and so on are all replicated.

It also has some communications capabilities already - FB's Live video-streaming service is built into the main Workplace service, while it has a separate "companion" app (Work Chat - link) for IM and voice/video. I strongly suspect it is based on WebRTC, as its consumer equivalent is one of the biggest users of the technology today. Work Chat also has file/image-sharing and (not all entirely professional) stickers, which are basically glorified emoji. 

Interestingly, the iOS appstore page for Chat - which says it's already at Version 48 - has a screenshot focusing on voice rather than video, although that may just be because it hasn't updated it yet (there's an old website link to At Work rather than Workplace too).

Some other things I've noticed:

• It references trial user companies (for internal deployment) include telcos Telenor and Telekom Austria
• Its partners / distributors include a division of Phillipines telco PLDT
• Unsurprisingly, there's a big pitch on security, privacy and data-ownership for companies that may be suspicious of FB's record.
• There's a big pitch for non-desk workers such as those in restaurants, on ships or industrial facilities (who are mostly likely to be mobile-first / mobile only, and which are often well outside the traditional UC/UCaaS universe). 
• It's apparently air-gapped from the consumer Facebook platform - although given WhatsApp's recent history, some may speculate how long that lasts.
• There's a way to create multi-company groups for federation, and presumably closed groups for suppliers/customers/partners.
• Various 3rd-party providers of identity for single sign-on support (including G Suite and MS Azure).

In common with Slack and some other UC and WCC-type offers, it suggests that use of messaging and workstreams may reduce the need for voice/video realtime communications as well as email. Its FAQ says that "Companies find that they can eliminate or drastically reduce their need for internal collaboration tools such as their intranet, telephony systems, video conferencing and distribution lists."

That is quite telling for me: "reduce their need" implies that Facebook doesn't immediately see its role as replacing old phone systems or UC (or UCaaS), or that it intends to jump into the conferencing space. Perhaps I'm inferring too much, but I suspect it means:

• Facebook isn't interested in becoming a business phone system or normal UCaaS platform, especially with PSTN interconnect. In any case, it is unclear that businesses would accept it any time soon - it's taking Microsoft a long time to move on from IM/UC to telephony.
• The apparent enthusiasm of various telco partners could just indicate prudent curiosity - or could indicate a future alignment with network-based telephony and numbering, especially given Facebook's love of phone number-based 2-factor authentication.
• Also at present, Workplace isn't being set up as a mechanism for B2C communications, as many thought it might. In many ways, that's more a role for consumer Facebook (& consumer FB identities) and perhaps WhatsApp for chatbots. Businesses have to pay for various services around their pages already.
• However, it would be very unsurprising if Workplace became more of an integration platform in future. I can easily imagine it - or partners - building ways to link it to other telephony, conferencing or CRM/call-centre systems or cloud providers. 
• Workplace could potentially become a hub for Slack-style "collaboration as a platform", also being done in various ways by Cisco Spark, Symphony, Broadsoft Tempo, Unify Circuit and many others.
• Given Facebook's enthusiasm for live video-streaming, video-calling and other communications abilities (especially in-app on mobile) it would not surprise me to see a cPaaS play or acquisition at some point. I suspect it wouldn't aim to compete with Twilio directly, or some other UC-style rivals such as Nexmo/Vonage, but either Cisco/Tropo or Tokbox could be closer to the firing line. (Actually, Tokbox would be an interesting M&A target, if Telefonica decides it can't leverage it more than it does today).
• I expect that a major push will be made later around "events" which seems to be mostly missing from the current release, and which is a huge draw on the consumer service. Renaming it to "meetings" or "appointments" would make a lot of sense, and absorb much more communications traffic in consequence.
• Facebook has perhaps the best way to categorising personal "context" of any company. Its status updates have a great set of tags of location, doing/feeling activities, tagged colleagues/friends and so forth. It has the potential to leverage this in Workplace to create a really interesting platform for Contextual Communications.

Overall, I think that Facebook Workplace looks like a much more subtle and oblique entry to enterprise communications than some people expected. It's not aiming to replace UC/UCaaS outright, but instead to gradually divert (steal?) a growing slice of the overall employee-to-employee (or cross-company) communications pie. This is very different to the way that the traditional enterprise comms companies like Cisco or Avaya or various cloud-based providers are going, where they typically aim to be at the centre of a firm's communications, radiating outward from phone or conferencing. Instead, Workplace seems to be a play for adjacency, siphoning off use from email and Slack and peripheral (often unloved) UC features, at a low price point.

If companies can get over their privacy-wariness from Facebook's consumer reputation, it has quite a lot of potential. I also suspect it could be seen as attractive as a channel play by some telcos' enterprise business units, especially where they have minimal mobile footprint today. It would probably sit alongside other UCaaS offers rather than replace them. Thus far, it's a bit unclear what Microsoft plans to do with LinkedIn, but that's also in the same universe.

But Workplace also represents a starting-point for some really interesting future cPaaS and integration plays. Facebook's familiar UI - and its vast realm of heritage and skill in design and UX - could be a gamechanger. It is rightly eschewing "boring old business phone systems" for now - but should be able to help create a variety of new voice and video experiences in subsequent enhancements, if it proves the basics, gains scale quickly, and mitigates residual concern about security and privacy.

If we call the message/timeline concept WCC, maybe this will end up being called wPaaS?

No, VoLTE is not the future of mobile voice

I've lost count of the articles and presentations I've seen recently, loudly proclaiming that VoLTE represents "The Future of Mobile Voice", or worse, "Allows telcos to compete against [so-called] OTTs". The run-up to MWC is likely to generate even more breathless and gushing tributes of this type.

But this is all nonsense. VoLTE is most definitely NOT the future of mobile voice. It's just the past of mobile telephony, with a lick of very expensive IP paint.

(It goes without saying that VoWiFi, RCS & ViLTE aren't the future of mobile comms either. See here for a full explanation, and watch out for another post soon).

VoLTE is still just "boring old phone calls", billed per minute, with interruptive caller-to-recipient ringing, based on E.164 numbers, with no customisation for purpose or context or sense-making. HD audio and embedding calls in apps via APIs aren't new either - they work for circuit calls too. Not only that, but VoLTE doesn't work very well - Amdocs recently providing evidence that calls drop far more frequently now. 

It's also hugely expensive and complex to implement, and in most cases different VoLTE networks don't interoperate, as they're all slightly different. The GSMA has even given a special acronym to its bug-fixing squad - now called VIRTUE (VoLTE Interoperability Resolution Expediting Task Force) - link here.

There are only two real purposes for VoLTE: supporting calls on 4G-only networks, and hopefully reclaiming some 2G/3G spectrum. Worthy, but not "the future". VoLTE will not increase telephony usage. Yes, faster call setup, better indoor coverage (4G or WiFi) and clearer HD might slow the decline a little, but neither are exactly groundbreaking. Fixed PSTN call setup has been instantaneous since the 1980s, and HD-quality voice has been available on both 3G networks and 3rd-party VoIP apps for years. VoLTE is arriving very late to the party, with a bottle of cheap supermarket lager, just as the cool people are heading somewhere else for champagne and whisky.


Peak Mobile Telephony

This is because telephony is yesterday's news, even mobile telephony. Looking around the world, many countries are past the point of "peak telephony", when adding together volumes of fixed+mobile outbound calls. Quite a few are now past "peak mobile telephony" as well, although others are still substituting fixed for mobile, as prices fall because of competition. 

Even those with growing overall call usage are seeing this driven by increasing numbers of users not usage per person, for example in India, where few people had phones at all in the past. Sometimes there's a blip of pent-up demand when flat-rate plans come into the market, or there's a recovery from an economic crash, but that's a one-off gain, not sustained growth.

But the simple fact of the matter is that once people have access to phones & (cheap) calls, there's a limit to how much they want to use. Use-cases are eroded by email, messaging, video communications, social networks, app-based interactions, notifications and the 100 other ways of connecting people and computers - even before WebRTC's help in accelerating the trend. 

There are, simply, better ways of doing almost anything than via a normal phone call.

This is already exhibited by usage trends, before we've even started the main part of this transition period. For example:

• The CTIA's annual survey reported a drop of 6.2% in US mobile voice-call minutes from 2013 to 2014, despite a broad shift to flat-rate plans and a 6% increase in the number of subscriptions. A similar fall in 2015 seems plausible.
• China Mobile did the same number of voice-calling minutes (1.60trn) in Q3'2015 as it did in Q3'2012, despite growing its customer base from 699m to 823m over the same period. That's a 15% decline in average use in three years. (Link)
• In the UK, EE has recently reported average minutes-of-use falling 4.4% year-on-year on average - and 8.6% for postpaid users.
• France bucks the trend - it has seen mobile telephony usage rise consistently, although that's perhaps because more competition from Free (and lower prices) has driven elasticity in usage. The chart on p32 here indicates that growth is flatter, though

In business telephony & UCaaS, there are mixed reports of growth by company, vertical and user role. But if you take out pre-arranged dial-ins to conference bridges (not really a "call" as such), the picture isn't pretty either.

In short, mobile telephony is (or has) peaked. I use fewer minutes per month on my phone than last year, and I bet you do as well. Upgrading to VoLTE won't change that, especially if it's less reliable.

When was the last time you phoned for a taxi, or called someone to invite them to a birthday party? Unless you work in telesales, how often do you use your phone - desk or mobile - to call a client or industry contact? How often do you scowl or tut, when your phone rings unexpectedly and distracts your concentration?

Phone calls won't disappear, no. But then there's plenty of fax machines still around, too.

More importantly still, if demand is falling or flat, while supply of telephony or near-substitutes is rising, the only economic outcome is falling prices. The revenue attributable to voice telephony is falling, even if volumes are holding up.

The painful fact is that telcos don't do "voice" in a general sense. They only do telephony, with an occasional side-order of voicemail, conferencing and push-to-talk. They are almost entirely absent from the 100s (soon to be 1000s) of other voice applications and use-cases. 


VoLTE is misnamed. It's just ToLTE. 

What else is there in voice besides phone calls? 

How about voice chat, asynchronous voice, speech-to-text, recording, real-time translation, priority voice, voice recognition, voice biometrics, voice messaging, stereo audio, aid for the blind, peer-to-peer, realtime captioning, voice PaaS, emergency group voice, gunshot detection, nurse-call functions, radio, virtual assistants, emotional analysis, karaoke, encrypted voice, hypervoice, IoT integration - and so on. 

Those are not phone calls, not billed (or measured) per-minute, not necessarily using phone numbers, often not subject to lawful interception, not regulated - but they are huge sources of current and potential value. But they need thought and innovation, not blind standards.

Then add in the whole rapidly-inflating universe of contextual communications and analytic/metadata-enriched voice, and you start to get the full picture. I'll cover intersections with machine-learning and IoT another time. Telephony is Alexander Graham Bell's view of voice communications, not the 21st century's. (Obviously, regulators and governments are even slower than telcos to work this out, though). 

(A couple of telcos have tried updating VoLTE to pre-announce why people are calling. Good idea, badly implemented. A topic for another post. Hint: blame RCS).

The voice-based service that's currently got the most buzz? No, not Skype or Viber or Whatsapp or any of the UC vendors. It's Amazon Echo and its Alexa virtual assistant. Echo has been around for a while, but in the last month or two everyone seems to have suddenly started creating integrations and cool services. "Alexa, get me an Uber", "Alexa, play Lady Gaga's Telephone on Spotify". Or, ironically, "Alexa, send my calls to voicemail", by innovative VoIP provider Ooma (link).

Add that to Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now, plus assorted other virtual assistants that are becoming the true face of future mobile (or fixed) voice communications. It will be (in part) about input/output and access to information. Not upgrading the string between two tin-cans to IP.

There's an upcoming conference on Mobile Voice in a couple of months. There are no mobile operators or even VoLTE vendors on the draft speaking roster. Ironically, the only CSP represented is cable operator Comcast. Forget the upcoming dinosaur exhibition in Barcelona - this is where the new mobile voice DNA is being developed. 

The obsession with VoLTE is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or creating an IP-powered horse buggy in the age of the car. Create your own analogy - there's plenty of examples of "missing the wood for the trees".


VoLTE is retro

In fact, perhaps the best analogy for VoLTE is the new-shape VW Beetle introduced in 1997, which took a lot of styling clues from the classic car made from 1938 onwards, updated for the modern era. It perpetuated a decades-old model, but with an underlying change in platform. It evolved from rear-engine/RWD, to front-engine/FWD - the equivalent of moving from TDM to IP in terms of phone calls. It still had 4 wheels, it was still internal-combustion, it was still sold via normal dealerships and distribution, and was financed in the usal ways. However, it was more complex and expensive than its predecessor.

While the New Beetle clearly fitted a market demand, and has been moderately successful, in hindsight it was not a game-changer in any way. It didn't represent the "future of cars". It hasn't been a blockbuster, let alone the "people's wagon". It was an up-to-date retro take on an old classic. The original Beetle sold about 21m units in 54 years. The New Beetle sold just 1m in its first 10 years to to 2008, and (with another refresh in 2012) it will probably do about the same in the next 10 years. People think it's quite cute, but it holds nowhere near the universal appeal of the original.

(I'd perhaps contrast the Beetle with the new Mini, which has spawned lots of different variants and now seems almost as iconic as the original 1950s Issigonis classic. Or perhaps another car analogy VoLTE should have emulated is the Porsche 911, which has continued to evolve incrementally for decades - it keeps the family resemblance, but is always fresh. And I'm not even going to invoke Tesla, Toyota Priuses, Google self-drive cars, car-club business models and other innovations).


Summary

VoLTE is the right answer, 7 years too late. It should have been part of LTE at launch on Day 1, designed-in and standardised during Year Minus-3. The industry forgot about it, and has been in panicky catch-up mode ever since, trying to shoehorn immature packet voice onto a complex new air-interface and core network. The focus has been on network QoS, standards and spectrum re-farming, rather than communications purpose, user-experience, analytics, devices or applications. The word "acoustic" didn't even appear in the original IR92 specifications.

It's too little, too late. It's a IP-homage to ye olde phone networkes of yore, not a shiny vision of the future of communications. Yes, we'll likely see continued growth in VoLTE deployments, with vendors making some money, while telco engineering departments look "busy" and justify their existence and budgets. 

Instead of putting R&D efforts in, hiring people who understand speech and behaviour, educating regulators, experimenting with new capabilities and models, or learning from other innovators, we get a group of people titled "head of voice" who mostly seem confused by the lack of Bakelite and rotary dials. And vendors happy to entrench the confirmation bias.

Try an experiment over the next month, especially at MWC: Mentally replace the word "voice" with "telephony" wherever you see or hear it. (Or replace VoLTE with ToLTE). It could be in press releases, CEO speeches, booth demos, business-card job titles, analyst research reports, Tweets or whatever. 

If voice/telephony makes no difference to the sentence's meaning, then that person or company simply doesn't get it. They're not the future of mobile voice - they're the past. They're telco equivalents of VW marketeers, with equally dodgy stats and polluting emissions.

Contextual communications - using device sensors as context

There are two main definitions of contextual communications that I encounter:

• Communications ina context (ie in-app or in-website)
• Communications using contextual data (ie what you're doing, or inferred/analysed information about the communications session)

A lot of the discussion in telecoms and WebRTC circles is about the first one - extending voice/video/realtime data uses, by embedding them into web pages or native mobile apps. These could be anything from video-chat in a banking app, to realtime voice chat in a game, or extending a corporate videoconference system to guests. This has many clear and obvious vector for innovation and value.

But the other dimension is perhaps slightly harder to grasp - using contextual data to improve a communications session in some way. Some examples are fairly straightforward - for example letting a contact centre agent know which page you were on when you hit "click to call", or do a database lookup: ("Ah, Mr Bubley, I see you were looking at flights to Singapore. Thank you for being a frequent flyer - would you like to redeem your miles, as the system shows that you have enough?"). 

That type of use is still in its infancy, and has a huge potential not just for customer service / call-centres, but also social network/comms, and enterprise UC/WCC implementations - as well as countless other niche software and web applications in consumer, telecom and business realms. Using contextual data during a call or conference or other session can meaningfully improve the "outcome" - whether that's making a sale, making a complaint, or working out how to meet up with friends.

But another area is less obvious - using contextual data from sensors as part of a voice/video session, to improve the interaction in some way. I've come across two examples in the past week:

• Talklessnow.com using the mic & your speaking patterns to tell you if you're dominating the conversation too much, or gabbling.
• Talko.com using motion-sensors in a phone, to allow callers to make better decisions about how/when to interact with you

The first one is a demo, not a full product, based on the idea that the microphone in a PC or smartphone is actually a general-purpose audio sensor. It's a project that's been driven by Chris Koehncke, and developed by &yet under the capable guidance of Philipp “fippo” Hancke, although the original idea came from me, which I then discussed over a beer in SF with Chris in October. My original vision was for this to be implemented in a wearable - so for example, a conference presenter could get a vibrating alert that he or she is talking too fast, and get a reminder to slow down, and add pauses. As Chris discusses on his post (here), when added to a browser it's also suitable for salespeople and others who really ought to be listening more and talking less.

 

There's many other use-cases for what's basically a simple idea - using the microphone as a sensor, answering questions like "how much of the time is sound coming in?" or "how fast is the person speaking compared to the pauses between words & sentences?". This is obviously different to the normal use of a mic, which is to actually capture and encode the content. This is more like audio metadata, which can then be applied to the logic of the communications application itself - whether that's a sales tool, or perhaps a conferences-speech coaching app.

I'm really excited by this - as it illustrates perfectly how a voice-app idea can go from a casual discussion in a bar to reality (or at least, proof of concept), with very little pain. I'm not sure exactly how much time Fippo and his team spent on this - but it wasn't a huge project. It's also only using one of the WebRTC APIs (to access the mic) so it's not hugely sophisticated, but that doesn't matter. It's the results and opportunities and services that are the point here.

The other example of sensor use + context + WebRTC is from a company I've talked about before - Ray Ozzie's Talko. This is a mobile collaboration app for teams, that blends one-way voice messages, text messages, two-way calls etc. into recorded and conversations-specific timelines.

I just reinstalled it on a new phone, and was interested in the permission it requested to get access to my iPhone's motion API, "so that, for example, others may choose not to disturb you while you're driving". Firstly it's great UI/UX design for an app to illustrate why it wants access to an API - it allows the user to make a more informed decision about privacy ad security. But more importantly, it's a great way to improve the communication experience.



Basically, the current concept of "presence" in IM is broken. "Offline" is usually a lie meaning "Don't talk to me". "Online" is usually a lie meaning "I forgot to reset my status" and so on. But by using the phone's sensors and APIs it's possible to get more useful presence indicators: "Dean is driving"; "Dean is at the airport and running"; "Dean's phone is on charge and in a timezone where it's 3am".

All of these are important contextual inputs for either the application, or the other people using it - to decide whether to interrupt you, initiate a "call" or send a message, and so forth. If the desired outcome is a successful collaboration, without unnecessarily disturbing people at the wrong times, this is a huge positive.

These are both comparatively simple examples of using available contextual data in new ways, to enhance a given instance of communications. This is where the value is in future for the telecom industry: not minutes, not filling in coverage gaps with WiFi, but actually helping voice/video become more useful and fulfil the actual user needs and purposes involved. But to do that, you need to have insight into specific problems that need to be solved for the user - whether that's dramatic pauses.......... in a conference speech, or avoiding interrupting someone while they're navigating Hyde Park Corner.

(There's a lot of other potential uses for this general idea, and various possible extensions, enhancements and integrations for Talklessnow and similar concepts. Get in touch with me if you'd like to discuss them, or if you want to arrange a speech or workshop about contextual communications more generally - information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com)

Cisco and Ericsson: Will the Enterprise move to Private IMS & Cellular?

A lot has been written already about the ramifications of the wide-ranging Cisco / Ericsson deal. Most industry analysts and other observers have already come up with assessments of areas of impact, effects on other vendors (eg Juniper), and the implications for various telco-network technologies such as SDN / NFV.

A fair amount of output has been interpreting the “official line” from the two vendors’ press releases and briefings, which have been a little thin on exact details of how the collaboration will evolve. Light Reading has collated a good set of opinions here, for example.

So I'm going to speculate a little - and consider what is not being mentioned so far. This is a blog post about "what might happen" - there's a lot of variables, complexity and execution risk. Caveat lector.


The story so far: Selling & integrating IP gear & cloud platforms for telcos

Looking around the web, it seems that there’s a roughly 80/20 split between analysis of telco-area implications vs. enterprise. This is unsurprising, given the early focus areas announced - the Ericsson CEO says “Initially the partnership will focus on SPs” in the release. Also, the bulk of observers who cover both companies are strongly focused on SP networks.

But my sense is that a few angles have been overlooked, especially about enterprise. I'll highlight a line in the slide-deck the companies used: "Creating leadership to address converging telco and enterprise domains".

The assumption among most people seems to be that "convergence" here is viewed only in one direction. It's assumed to mean an increasing role for telcos in managing enterprise networks and communications functions. And yes, a lot is about combined sales to/through telcos. Cisco gets to sell IP gear via Ericsson's huge SP-focused services and integration teams, and better integrate its products with the OSS/BSS domain. Going forward, the partnership can allow better network/service coverage in corporate offices, or enable assorted business cloud and IoT offers to be provided by telecom operators.

Yet "convergence" occurs when two trends meet in the middle. There's another side here: enterprises starting to adopt or manage telco-type networks and capabilities. 

But what's in it for the enterprise?

So what does Ericsson have, that Cisco can sell / add value to via its enterprise channels? And what new combined products might come from both firms' R&D labs that could be of interest beyond the reach of telcos, sold directly into the corporate domain?

I have sensed for a while that Ericsson wanted more direct business with enterprises and governments - it recognises that its addressable market for telco capex/opex (whether hardware or managed services) is limited by telcos' own growth difficulties, as well as competition from Huawei, wariness of IT players like Oracle, and the move to software-based (and sometimes open-source) infrastructure. 

It was no coincidence that last year's analyst conference in Stockholm was held partly in Volvo's premises. Or in another area I watch closely, that its WebRTC activities have involved things like online banking (see here) without a mention of telcos at all.

It's not just Ericsson. We've also seen other telecom vendors pitch to goverments, city authorities, utilities, transportation companies and so forth. There are private cellular networks intended for railways and mining operations, to e-commerce and cloud propositions, or re-use of billing/charging for utilities and smart city initiatives. Quite a few vendors also sell to "non-telco SPs", ranging from call-centre providers to (ssshhhhh!!!) big Internet firms, as well as amenity-type public WiFi implementors.

So - the question is what the joint Cisco/Ericsson initiatives might be for enterprise. The briefing deck gives some rather vague lines like "comprehensive systems integration, managed services and technical support for enterprises" as well as "cloud and data-centres" which potentially cover a multitude of sins.

Another interesting line is "Networks of the future require new design principles to ensure agility, autonomy, and security". The interesting word there is "autonomy" which means "the right or condition of self-government." For whom, exactly? For telcos, it could mean the freedom to choose between multiple vendors' platform ad 3rd-party VNFs - but I'm not convinced that's a story that Cisco and Ericsson really buy into.

My sense is that actually - and this is probably a medium-term thing rather than immediate - there are three aspects:

• Distributed enterprise cloud platforms. This should be unsurprising given both references in the announcement, and Cisco's data-centre expertise. Ericsson SDN/NFV work could fit in here, although it's not the main focus of this post.
• Private wireless. This includes both WiFi and potentially private cellular networks, indoor, on campuses, and perhaps for large areas or governmental applications.
• Comms, Collaboration & Private IMS. Both partners have a lot of history in voice, messaging and video communications, not just in telcos but also deployed by businesses. Ericsson used to make PBXs but sold to Aastra in 2008. While UC, cloud and collaboration is impacting the traditional PBX/IP-PBX market, that doesn't mean that enterprises want everything delivered "as a service". Cisco & Ericsson can help both telcos' UCaaS propositions - but also help corporations take back control in-house.

It should be noted that the last two points are unlikely to be especially popular with the telecom service provider community, and would thus not be the focus of the initial SP-friendly announcement.


Private Wireless

Together, Cisco and Ericsson have a decent chance of “fixing” indoor mobile coverage, capacity and control for large enterprises. Both have WiFi assets and also small-cell exposure (Cisco especially via its SpiderCloud partnership), but the kicker here is Cisco’s footprint and understanding of the enterprise fixed LAN and security domain. 

There are two angles here:

• Helping mobile operators "reach" deeper into enterprises to allow better in-building cellular coverage, WiFi offload/voice and (in the GSMA's dreams) run corporate wireless data connectivity as a fully-managed service. Print-over-4G....
• Allow enterprises to better manage and run their own mobile infrastructure, most obviously in unlicenced spectrum. This could extend beyond traditional WiFi towards allowing private management of LPWAN (low power networks) for IoT, rather than using Opex-centric services like SigFox's.

Historically, one of the main problems for enterprise pico/femtocells, or use of corporate WiFi for offload and carrier VoIP, has been how these coexist with the corporate-run firewalls and in-house network management and prioritisation. Normally, telco visibility/control ends “outside” a demarcation point. Most enterprises will view outbound VPN tunnels from small cells, or external control of devices on the LAN, as a security risk. Telcos, in turn, are hesitant to offer service guarantees where they have limited ability to measure or manage performance – and will also see security issues. 

There are also various issues with security, privacy and legal liability when using a 3rd-party cloud platform for identity, data processing or storage.

There is a chance here for Cisco and Ericsson to create solutions to all these areas. The short-term headlines will probably be around better in-building cellular (competing with DAS and, implicitly, SpiderCloud) and IMS WiFi-voice support, but the longer-term vision will perhaps include:

• Carrier-managed enterprise WiFi, perhaps in neutral-host mode to support multiple cellular operators' subscribers on the same network
• Private corporate-run LTE-U networks, maybe using Qualcomm's MuLTEfire or something similar, for indoor or campus usage
• Private IoT networks using both unlicenced and licenced spectrum, linked into corporate IT and communications systems directly, rather than via a service provider
• Licenced-band cellular for non-telco organisations with access to cellular spectrum (eg public safety networks, rail/transport systems, maybe smart cities or big oil/mining companies in remote areas)
• (Perhaps, depending on regulation) ways to enable "corporate MVNOs" 

This is all pretty speculative - and it may be that some of these concepts are a long way off, and perhaps not even fully-considered by Ericsson and Cisco themselves. (Get in touch if you'd like me to run a brainstorm workshop, guys!)
 
 
Comms, Collaboration & Private IMS

Absent from the announcement was any clear reference to communications: UC/UCaaS, IMS, VoLTE, WebEx, Spark, WebRTC and so forth are, to me, elephants in the room.
 

Predictable things we'll likely see include various Cisco-to-Ericsson moves, around UCaaS and WebEX linked to Ericsson's IMS. But I think that's only part of the story that will emerge.

 

Let's go back to that term "autonomy" from above. 

 

It's easier to get seduced by the idea that enterprises (and small businesses) want to get rid of their old on-premise phone systems, recognise their employees are mobile-first and BYOD-minded, and shift to some form of UCaaS platform linked to a telco network and number. Yet on the ground, plenty of enterprises either want to keep control of their own communications system, or are using 3rd-party Internet-based tools like Slack, rather than an SP's integrated proposition. 

 

I don't think that's going to change - many businesses prefer to keep hold of their own "phone" system, especially as it becomes part of their messaging or contact-centre or contextual-comms platform. That doesn't mean it has to be a lump of tin, or a proprietary IP-PBX platform for call control - it could be in the cloud, or using standardised software elements. It just doesn't have to be a "per-seat per-month" cost model. 

 

A rather surprising term I’ve heard a few times recently – mostly from folk in the IT/cloud industry – is “enterprise IMS”. It’s not an industry-standard term, but basically, it means that some large businesses want to deploy their own internal IMS-type infrastructures as communications/service platforms. These might be owned outright, managed on-site by third parties, or delivered from multi-tenant clouds in the same fashion as UCaaS today. But I think this area is one of the likely mid-term outcomes of the Ericsson / Cisco deal, if the concept comes to fruition.

Remember - PBX stood for Private Branch Exchange. We should not be surprised if the IP and Mobile equivalent turns out to be the enterprise-owned PIMS, not a "mobile PBX" run as a service in a telco network. 

 

It’s being catalysed by a few things:

• Mobile and BYOD: many employees are using mobile devices for most of their business communications. But most UC/smartphone implementations are still a bit clunky, with varying UIs depending on device and especially iOS vs. Android. Having an enterprise-run IMS (and voice application) would potentially allow the CIO to regain control of the “native dialler” on a phone, especially when connected in-building. There are open questions about numbering, but they may be tractable.
• Cloud / Open-Source IMS: A few years ago, the idea of an enterprise owning an IMS would have been ludicrous, given the costs involved. But now, with virtualisation, cost pressures by telcos wanting cheap VoLTE, the emergence of open-source options like Metaswitch Clearwater, it is becoming much more downward-scalable. PIMS is starting to look like a cost-effective option.
• Applications: Currently pretty much the only useful IMS application is straightforward VoIP/VoLTE phone calls. That isn't enterprise-optimised - it lacks the typical PBX-type functions that are needed. There aren't really telco-IMS contact centre apps, and nonsense like RCS certainly doesn't address enterprise messaging. Having a PIMS/WebEx/Spark combination would be much more interesting. Potentially it could also be run as an operator-hosted service, but I think the real value is where it is owned outright.
• Middleware & APIs: Where this starts getting really interesting is in the creation of integrated apps blending a corporate comms platform, with corporate IT systems. Hooking into existing software platforms for sales or field automation, line of business and so forth. Potentially this is where a combination of a Cisco/Ericsson PIMS + Tropo starts looking interest. (Sidenote: unlike GenBand with Kandy, Ericsson lacks a WebRTC PaaS)

There’s a few other angles that play in here too. Most notably Cisco's earlier partnership with Apple, which I think many have underestimated. It is likely to optimise iPhones & iPads for use with Cisco's security, WiFi and collaboration tools. I can envisage a situation where companies ditch their old desk-phones for Apple i-Devices, either BYOD or company-issued, linked to Cisco communications apps running via an Ericsson PIMS, with outbound SIP/IMS trunks if needed. Potentially this could work with virtual numbers as well - not just for the US where fixed/mobile numbers are indistinguishable, but the rest of the world where mobile numbers are from separate defined ranges. 

Having a corporate-issued mobile number, anchored in a PIMS, would make a lot of difference - ability to use SMS, better fit with assorted apps that use mobile numbers for identity or authentication, porting in/out, maybe even assigning mobile numbers to IoT objects. There's a lot of variables here, and the rules will likely vary by country.

And for a long-range view, consider Apple’s work on virtual / eSIMs added in to this. Telcos might not like the idea of virtual SIMs in phones – but an enterprise, running its own IMS, its own WiFi network, and perhaps having access to LTE-U and maybe even its own mobile network code – may not be so squeamish. There are various types and styles of enterprise MNO and MVNO that can be envisaged here, depending on local regulation, willingness of local operators to wholesale or allow roaming, or even share spectrum. I can even imagine an “enterprise MNO” being run as a managed service by Ericsson.

Who would be impacted by this? Microsoft is at the top of the list, and also the traditional mobile operators’ enterprise units which still make good margins on corporate mobile subscriptions. It also sits against the emerging Google/Android/Telcos/BroadSoft/Switch enterprise ecosystem. Avaya is left looking a bit lonely here (although it also works with Google), as are the smaller UC players like Shoretel. It possibly even makes the bizarre Mitel/Mavenir acquisition look more sensible in hindsight, although that’s still pretty baffling.

The interesting question is whether Cisco and Ericsson have actually looked closely at what they might be catalysing – or whether they are themselves likely to be as surprised by the direction of travel. Obviously there are lots of questions about execution that come first, but if things go well, there could be a game-changer afoot.

(None of this is entirely new as a concept. About 10 years ago, I did consulting for a company called Zynetix (later bought by Sonus Networks) that sold enterprise-grade cellular-core MSCs that linked to PBXs. They could allow businesses to run private mobile networks, especially when linked to pico/femtocells running in “guard band” spectrum in the UK. However it was perhaps ahead of its time, hampered by some of the practicalities such as spectrum/radio limitations, needing clunky user-experience hacks like manually selecting different networks).

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: the notion that ALL enterprises will outsource the bulk of their internal networking or communications functions, especially to telecoms service providers, is a comforting myth. Yes, some will - hence the rise of UCaaS for mid-market businesses, and telco-managed WiFi in places like airports or sports stadia.

But that is only part of the story.  

Some enterprises will want to continue managing networks and communications in-house (whether on-premise or in a private cloud). This will ideally expand to include aspects of mobile networks/services where possible. Expect PIMS, better WiFi, PLWPAN and maybe PLTE and PMVNO models. Others will want to outsource these functions to IT-type service providers like IBM, rather than telcos.

Potentially, Cisco+Ericsson (with a side-order of Apple) can facilitate all these different paths to the user. This might not be popular among traditional telcos, but in my view the trend is inevitable. Enterprises will re-assert their control (and sometimes ownership) of wireless/mobile networks and communications platforms, especially as they become more-integrated with business processes and applications. 

There's a lot of reasons why this partnership might fail to bear fruit. But a lack of potential exciting and disruptive opportunities in enterprise isn't one of them.