Anyone who travels outside the United States quickly realizes that the people "over there" know a lot more about us than we do about them.

In fact, the geographic isolation of the United States can combine with the fact that the United States is the largest national economy to create a kind of cultural myopia. In a couple of trips to Europe in the last month, I saw some examples of that and found some truths that we'd be well advised to consider in the United States.

One truth is that the major common carriers in the rest of the world are totally committed to vertical integration with application partners outside their company to create advanced services. Of the dozen or more providers I've talked to, only one outside the United States has any resistance to this notion. In the United States it's hard to pin providers down to a position, but it's safe to say that none of our own carriers are out stumping for vertical partners to offer new services.

The reason that providers elsewhere are so focused on vertical partnerships is that they realize that failing to create some specific linkage between their networks and higher-layer applications forces everything to an over-the-top or Internet model, where the provider is cut out of the revenue stream for new services. The "walled garden" is almost completely rejected internationally. It's not that the operators don't have some plans for higher-layer services, but that they don't think they can provide them all.

If you think about it, these international carriers may be on to something. If carriers create special features in their networks, features that range from network-related things, such as premium QoS, to new things, such as centralized presence and identity management, they can offer these to high-level partners to create enhanced applications. including software-as-a-service and content delivery.

Sure, this kind of stuff is being done on the Internet, but isn't it logical to assume that competitors in the content or software-as-a-service space would offer premium handling if they had the option, as a differentiator? If they did, the carrier gets a revenue stream from a set of applications that would otherwise add to Internet traffic and create additional use the carrier wouldn't get paid for.