A key solution in facilitating the fast growth and success of any new communications environment is building the foundation for business building blocks. Currently it seems that the many downsides in wireless networking systems results from the rather constraining nature of SBM. For many access network providers (ANPs), it is the only really workable, underlying business model. However, when considered next to CBM, one could discern its weaknesses in providing the stimulus, the motivation and the glue for a real-life integrated 4G networking. For CBM to become a reality, it itself will have to have a business attraction, and not be something imposed. This will probably also have to come from outside the major cellular wireless ANPs as, initially at least, CBM may be perceived to be antagonistic to their business interests.
When addressing how to open the mobile communications environment to a wide range of new entrants, whether coming with new or old technology, whether filling niches in network accesses or provision of services, or challenging major ANPs with more modern, reconfigurable, adaptable systems, and so forth, it is clear that a new business foundation free from the constraints of the subscriber business culture is called for. In attempting to define such a new business foundation for the global wireless environment, appropriate standardization and regulatory support needs to be considered. Without such support, ensuring a global footprint for this new environment is not possible.
Since 2002 there has been significant research performed in the field of future 4G integrated networks, including architectures and business models. In 2003, a number of new projects were started within the frameworks of the European Union's Information Society Technology (EU-IST). Some examples are MOBY DICK, BRAIN/ MIND, SCOUT, ETSI BRAN, MOBIVAS, and the Academic Network for Wireless Internet Research in Europe (ANWIRE). Further research was carried out in this area by different work groups (WG) of standardization bodies and forums such as the WG2 and WG3 of the Wireless World Research Forum (WWRF), and the ITU-T NGN Focus Group (http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/ngn/fgngn). Much of this research was focused on system and service integration in heterogeneous network environments creating new integration architectures founded on an all-IP infrastructure. This characterized the main trust of ‘4G’ as perceived formally within the EU, differing in this to the definitions and perceptions of what 4G was in other economic regions. Within the ANWIRE project and the WWRF WG2 especially, some research work was supported on business models. An interesting aspect of this work was their investigations in to how to place the system users more at the centre of communication systems evolution.
In the ANWIRE project, researchers progressed this idea also by addressing the monopoly positions of the network providers -supporting the traditional subscriber-centric model-, and how this facilitated, or otherwise, the evolution and advanced development in cellular wireless networks and services. They found that regardless of the technological approach taken, in such systems, the subscribers are practically limited by the technology and service environment available with their subscriptions. For instance, the capability to use services from other service providers is inherently very limited. Such constraints have serious implications for future wireless access evolution. Much of the ANWIRE contributions on these matters have their source in the Telecommunications Research Centre (TRC) in the University of Limerick. The initial proposal for the new business model -Consumer-centric Business Model (CBM)- to remove such limitations by creating a new extra-network entity in which to locate the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting services originated from there, in 2004, (O'Droma & Ganchev, 2004). This new wireless environment entity, of which there could be many, was called the Third-Party Authentication, Authorization and Accounting Service Provider (3P-AAA-SP). The original model was later refined in (O'Droma & Ganchev, 2007). Also in the ANWIRE project, a Generic ANWIRE System and Service Integration Architecture (GAIA) was proposed and elaborated, (Ganchev et al., 2006); it was specifically referring to it as a new 4G architecture as then understood within the EU thinking. How this could form a basis for CBM was elaborated there. GAIA employs the principles of the "always best connected and best served" (ABC&S) paradigm (Ganchev et al., 2006). The ideas were further refined and re-positioned less as a specifically 4G technology and more as a new wireless communications environment and business foundation for 4G and for further wireless technological generations. Given, among other reasons, its radical placing of the user at the centre and the user-empowerment with normal consumer attributes unavailable to subscriber-users, this wireless environment was called a Ubiquitous Consumer Wireless World (UCWW), (O'Droma & Ganchev, 2007).
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