One Bucket for Voice and Broadband

One of the reasons unified communications, unified messaging, unified services, fixed mobile convergence, mashups and other similar concepts are so confusing is partly because there are lots of different ways they can be implemented, and because they highlight different ways software usage and communications are changing.

In some future incarnation, users who pay money for services will be able to invoke various identities and roles when using those services and features, with some sort of analogy to "multiple service, single log in" rather than "single service, single sign-on."

In other words, where today users might have to log in serially to multiple services they want to use, in the future they might be able to log in once, but use different features, devices and network services depending on their "roles" and "identities," while the network itself figures out all the details of authentication and security.

In the nearer term, it might be more common to find that customers buy a service, such as "voice and messaging" or "broadband access," and then be able to use any number of access networks or devices as part of the one service. Think of a single bucket of usage that can be used for "calling," "messaging" or Web surfing, for example.

Instead of buying separate 3G wireless service, digital subscriber line and then Wi-Fi hotspot service, a user might be able to buy "broadband" and use all the various modalities. The same sort of concept might hold for "calling," where mobile, fixed or PC-mediated, TV-mediated, game console or some other format is used.

AT&T is pushing that way, for example. Having a large internal customer base, or "community" if you like, it can leverage assets and relationships in a fairly broad way. All AT&T voice customers, for example, are one huge calling community.

In the meantime, lots of changes on lots of fronts will keep happening, pushing almost inexorably toward a future where features are made available not on a location or device or number level, but at a authenticated user level. Beyond that lies the ability to invoke features based on an identity or role.