The industry is addressing techno-commercial challenges after promising combo services  

THE `SANGAM': Emerging digital convergence of communication and entertainment platforms

THE GALLOPING pace of technology change, sometimes throws up strange new terms and buzzwords. The latest is this business of `wireless cable' -- surely a contradiction in terms. How can a palpably wire-based delivery mechanism like cable be wireless?

As the Americans say, "you ain't seen nothin' yet." The term is born out of the emerging digital convergence of communication and entertainment platforms. This is just one exciting, new technology that is emerging on the sidelines of the communication industry's quest for the telecom holy grail: Triple Play. This is an omnibus term that broadly indicates that voice, video and data are all being moved to homes and offices along the same pipe.

Consumer's viewpoint

The logic from the customer's viewpoint is this: I have TV via cable and set top box; I have Internet via broadband -- either through a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or an Ethernet link. I have my mobile phone. And I have always had the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) or landline phone connection. If only I could have all this serviced for me by one pipe and one provider.

The global telecom industry is presently saying to such customers: Thy wish is our command! And the ripples are just lapping up Indian shores. Consider:

-- Reliance is starting to deploy its nationwide NetWay 100 Megabits per second (MBPS) fibre network to start sending Triple Play content to subscribers, probably starting with Internet and video on demand.

-- Bharti have announced plans to extend their 40,000 km broadband cable network to 10 States before March 2006. Their recent partnership with the world's biggest telecom player, Vodafone, almost certainly indicates an early plunge into the deep end of triple play.

-- The Chennai-based Midas Communication recently unveiled a new product offering, Citius, where broadband triple play offerings can be sent over existing legacy Cable TV networks.

-- MTNL and BSNL have invested heavily in the infrastructure to shift broadband services from fibre telephone lines to cable. The Tatas and their VSNL arm are morphing what was basically a dial up service into a lean and mean broadband offering nationwide.

Also on the radar of Triple Play providers is some thing being called IPTV -- that is, TV delivered over an Internet Protocol network.

This does not mean the public Internet but a private IP network which will in effect transform the one-way experience of TV as we now know it into a two-way interactive experience.

We can check our mail on one part the screen, while the India-Sri Lanka One Day match is playing on another -- to be enlarged to full screen only -- when something exciting happens.

But if ARPU -- the average revenue per user -- after triple play, is set to rise sharply, so are the teething troubles. The level of complexity in moving such technology to the home or office customer is non-trivial.

Service Providers are aware that they will face steeply increased calls from customers if the hardware does not self-install or the quality of service deteriorates.

At their end they need to install new systems to address more sophisticated traffic management, filter and prioritise content and create appliance-aware firewalls. .

Which is why niche players like Bangalore and Redwood California (U.S.) based SupportSoft find themselves suddenly very popular. SupportSoft's core offering is real time service management, arming telecom and Net service providers as well as connected corporates with the ability to retain customers and sustain competitive edge.