Meet the New-Age Carriers
Philip Carden
Carriers are stampeding toward the millennium, and shelling out big bucks to build the services they believe customers will demand. You've heard all the buzzwords-convergence, e-telecoms, broadband, voice over IP-but how will these new services affect your communications strategy? How will they change the organizational structure-or your job? And how will your management strategies regarding your carriers evolve?
Not only will the way you manage carriers need to be refined, but you may also find that you need different carriers for different reasons. Three to four classes of carrier service will emerge as we progress into the next decade. High-speed global IP access-whether wireline, wireless or a combination of the two-is one major carrier function. Customer interaction-Web sites and integrated virtual call centers-is another. If your organization is keen on outsourcing, application hosting may be a third. And finally, you'll need a carrier to provide IP bandwidth between corporate sites.
Each of these telecom requirements can be delivered separately. And it's possible to deal with more than one carrier within each category. But it's best to consolidate with a single global access provider. From a service-level management perspective, it pays for the access provider to host the IP backbone, virtual call center, and Web-hosting and application-hosting services, too.
Will one carrier be able to handle all this? Over the next five years, the answer is "maybe." Depending on the geographic footprint of your organization, several U.S. carriers-including AT&T, Frontier Communications, MCI WorldCom, Qwest Communications and Sprint-are close to being able to deliver the critical combination of backbone bandwidth and broad coverage for high-speed, "last-mile" services. Indeed, AT&T and Sprint seem strongly committed to delivering these capabilities entirely through their own facilities, rather than through alliances with other firms.........cont
Complete link: techweb.com
Frank, the last mile is like a giant chess game.... lots of moving pieces all with different functions.
regards,
Denis
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