The telecom-web convergence market

There has been a surge of interest from enterprises and internet businesses looking to integrate mobile functionality into their services, to enhance current offerings and/or power cutting-edge services. Now, a mixture of established and new technologies is presenting a wide range of choices for businesses looking to take advantage of the opportunities that mobile telecommunications offer.

The internet marketplace is an area experiencing growth in business demand for mobile interaction services. Major internet businesses are increasingly offering services that enable consumers and businesses to communicate using online technologies. Until now, however, companies have not been able to tap into the flexibility and convenience of mobile communications. Yet as companies such as tyntec are driving a trend towards telecom and web convergence, online services are beginning to recognize the value of integrating what has become such a key part of consumers’ communication habits: mobile functionality.

One of the challenges that businesses – internet companies in particular – face in integrating mobile services into their offering is the fragmentation and complexity in the telecommunication market. Mobile users today have access to a wide range of devices and numbers (corporate and personal phones, email accounts, VoIP accounts, landlines) as well as of services (voice, SMS, mobile instant messaging (MIM), mobile email, mobile social networking, apps, mobile internet).

This fragmentation is also present at structural, service and technical levels. The telecoms market itself is highly fragmented as it is comprised of an array of independent operators using differing devices and communications formats. What’s more, operators face diverse regulations and complex market structures from regional regulators.

This wealth of options provides a broad range of communications choices. Yet for enterprises, consumers and internet companies, this also means an additional layer of complexity and fragmentation.

The answer to these challenges lies in the area known as telecom-web convergence, which simplifies the fragmented mobile world and enables businesses to seamlessly integrate mobile to enhance or support new services. It overcomes the service, structural and technical complexities of the mobile world and enables universal services such as voice and SMS to work as an integral part of an internet service.

There are clear signs that the convergence between telcos and the web is going to be a major part of the future of mobile interaction. The trend in all communications technologies has been towards convergence, be it the convergence offered by unified communications or between technologies such as television and the web. The rise of a new wave of large internet services offering millions of people new online communications channels is creating a new era of convergence. As people’s communications become increasingly based around their online profiles, the need to integrate mobile functionality will become ever more important, thereby driving the need for seamless, global and simplified telco-web convergence.

tyntec is taking the lead in this area by enabling mobile telephony based on voice and SMS for internet and by enabling internet companies to retain customers with ’over the top’ services using its tt.One solution.

The tt.One solution enables the convergence of the previously separate worlds of telecom and internet by managing interfaces with mobile operators around the world and handling the complexity of different technical and device formats and languages. This solution enables internet companies – including social networks, ISPs, ASPs, virtual dating, micro-blogging, and many others – to add a mobile phone number to online, web 2.0 and apps with all its capabilities translated into the IP environment, including full voice and SMS connectivity.