* Solution would broaden broadband communications for consumer market
BroadSoft has announced enhancements to its consumer solutions for telecommunications service providers designed to broaden wireless, wireline and cable carriers’ broadband communications offerings for the consumer market. The approach builds on the company’s existing BroadWorks VoIP application platform that is already in use by carriers to serve the enterprise market. BroadSoft is, according to the company, using its platform to extend services via “multimedia communication sessions between devices for voice, video, messaging and content, beyond the boundaries of the subscriber home.”
BroadSoft makes unified communications easier
In its announced strategy, BroadSoft points out that the ways consumers communicate continues to grow both with the many types of media across a wide variety of devices. BroadSoft suggests that in a parallel requirement to the business user’s needs, consumers will want a single online account to connect and manage these devices across multiple media, further suggesting that an IP application infrastructure is required to support this new communication model. BroadSoft believes that service providers can deliver greater value to their subscribers and create new revenue opportunities with enhanced consumer services support for personalization, multimedia communications, and mobility so consumers can remain fully connected regardless of location and device.
Our observations: We agree with BroadSoft that consumers will be well served by carrier solutions that reduce the complexity of the consumer’s communications. Extending communications tools used at work into the consumer market also makes sense. What will be interesting to see is how the consumer market evolves to adopt the consumer versions of unified communications or fixed mobile convergence.
For example, will customers choose a Web-based service like Google Voice to consolidate e-mail, voice mail and call routing or will they look to their local phone company to provide these features as part of a triple /quadruple play? Perhaps both models will be successful. But, as we have observed before: if a communications tool like e-mail, voice mail or instant messaging is first useful either at home or in the office, the tool invariable finds itself being useful in both environments.
