Pervasiveness in Converged Telecommunications: A Business Opportunity for the Operators

Mobility has become a central part of the lives of European citizens. Rapid technological development in the areas of mobility and telecommunications has resulted in not only a bewildering technology picture, but also uncertainties regarding business models and the roles that different businesses can play within this new picture. In this paper we take the concept of pervasive and ubiquitous services as a starting point and outline a new value network, where Service and Network Aggregators cooperate with multiple content / service providers and access network operators respectively. In this new value network, we evaluate the opportunities for telecom operators and we investigate some novel business models with varying degrees of changes and adaptation required to the current market and business roles for telecom operators. Finally we discuss a service framework that provides a flexible and precise basis for the analysis of the above roles and business models