In The Loop

It’s not all about the cell phones. Watch your TV change next year. Over the past few weeks, Google’s announced purchase of Motorola Mobility turned a lot of heads (news lists) and got bloggers going about what it means for original cell phone manufacturer (CNET link) to sell out to the information giant. But what’s even more interesting is what it could mean for the cable industry as Google acquires Motorola’s massive cable modem business. More…

Every year, communications service providers kick off projects to determine whether improving their back-office infrastructure makes sense. It’s often a time-consuming and financially exhausting process for the provider as well as the vendors involved. Before you take on this kind of effort, consider the three questions below.

If your business support systems are the heart of your business, then replacing back-office infrastructure like billing is something like open-heart surgery More…

The data discussion is heating up for utilities. Anyone who isn’t paying attention after this week’s news may want to start.

The smart grid renovation of the utility market is going to create a torrent of usage data like nothing the utility industry has seen before. It’s something telecoms and wireless operators have dealt with for a while now: timely usage, two-way machine communications, and near-real-time account updates from the consumer device. And we in the billing and OSS space who serve these operators understand the data magnitude intuitively. But it’s going to be a change for utility operators who are used to gathering usage once every month or two. A reality check, you might say.

The buzz around Google and Zigbee in the home area networking space lends even more credibility to the size of the data project that lies ahead for all of us as the smart grid become reality. When the world’s most prevalent data miner gets involved, you know there’s value in the space. Jesse Berst at Smart Grid News raises the question this week of whether Google can overtake the Zigbee standard already begun.

It may be that utilities will borrow the experience and lessons learned by the telecom industry as they prepare to build the networks that will carry this data. Or, they may stay traditional and build it themselves. We’ll be discussing this with others in the utility space in a few weeks at the B/OSS Live event in D.C. Join us there or let us know your thoughts here. And stay tuned. More…