Major Telco Providers Form Open Source Alliance

An anonymous reader writes "Several major telecom companies have come together to form a new alliance. Founded January 1, 2006 by Alcatel, Ericsson, Motorola, NEC, Nokia and Siemens, "SCOPE", is helping to promote the availability of open carrier grade base platforms based on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware / software and Free Open Source Software (FOSS) building blocks, and to promote interoperability to better serve Service Providers and consumers. " It's worth noting that a number of these companies have also been OSDL members, pursuing the same agenda.

Comments

Is this a good thing?

[qualico]

"SCOPE will focus on existing open specifications it believes best meets the needs of Service Providers."

Why does that scare me?

"SCOPE will not create specifications, but it will establish profiles"
"What is a profile?
A profile is a subset of the already existing specification from the standardization bodies
like PIGMG, OSDL, SA Forum and others. This subset - or profile - reflects the technical
requirements regarding the interfaces and building blocks to form a Carrier Grade Base
Platform to meet the Service Providers' requirements."

So they are going to cherry pick what they feel is the compliment of standards to clump together?

Why does that scare me?

"It will leverage the extensive
mutual membership between SCOPE and other related organizations."

Why does that ...never mind.

"Gap analysis: If the previous requirement analysis points out missing options or features,
they are documented and individual member companies work with specification
organizations to address these gaps."

ok..that sounds good.

"If SCOPE didn't exist, what would the impact be on COTS adoption in the carrier Grade
Platform space?
SCOPE provides guidance to the ecosystem without which the COTS adoption of Carrier
Grade Platform standards and specifications would be a slower process.
SCOPE considers all relevant standards and specifications in a Carrier Grade Platform
context and will identify any gap, promote and enable consistency across all relevant
standards and specifications.
Due to the richness and flexibility of existing standards and specifications, the market would
likely be fragmented and the advantages of economies of scale would be lost."

This should have been in the main body of the story.
It seems more to the point.

Hope this new collaboration is a good thing for consumers.
Hell has a road paved with good intentions.

Ericsson Erlang Open Source

[masters]

Ericsson already has a history of providing open source. See Erlang Does anyone know of open source solutions that the other companies provide?

Telcom providers getting outsourced, too

[dada21]

This looks to be a step for the telcom providers to give themselves some direction to move into, now that their ability to extract profits from providing a dying service is coming to a close.

I've seen so many great products that will come to the market in the next 6-18 months that can replace your cell phone (which replaced my landline). Most utilize WiFi to communicate with others inside and outside of the network. PocketSkype sorta deal.

Will this replace anyone soon? Probably not. I do believe the fight to regulate the Internet will come directly out of two things: "lost" sales tax revenue, and lost POTS business. If the 'net can get past both of these, we'll see some amazing communications devices released, and we can only hope to see the wasted spectrum of cell phones (and TV and radio) gives up for a more unregulated WiFi-style spectrum to utilize more efficiently.

In my "investigations" I believe T-Mobile will be the first to release a product that could be considered a knife in their own back: the multi-band GSM/WiFi cell phone that actually transitions cell calls to VoIP automatically. They've been investigating it for years and were ahead of most other providers in offering large companies with no T-Mobile signal a chance to set up an IP-based repeater.

Open source is a must-have for the telcos. If they can feel their death is imminent (say, 10-20 years), the best thing they can do to all their 100 years of proprietary architecture is to dump it, transition to open source APIs and software, and be ahead of the pack in making the transition to communications-via-IP. This will kill off the possibility of anyone trying to resurrect the old way.

I don't think the open source push is being performed for the user's interests, but I do think it will bring unintended consequences for the communications cartels. I can't wait to see how we're communicating in 10 years -- just 10 years ago I remember paying up to 20-40 cents a minute for an in-state (out of area) call.

"Major Telco"

[Orrin Bloquy]

Isn't he Cmdr. Taco's ranking officer?

Re:Missing someone?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent down, this is not insightful, he misses the point completely:

this alliance of telco *providers* was formed to fight the telcos because if the telcos have things their way, the providers lose the ability to bargain with them. (it's called monopsony instead of monopoly, look it up on wikipedia)

They may not ultimately be successful, but at least understand the point of it, the telcos are hardly going to join.