A Simple Question: What Is a “Service”?

By: Dan Baker, Research Director, Technology Research Institute

Language—no matter which one—is imprecise in the way that it’s used to explain complex telecom subjects.

A perfect example in English is the term “service”.  What exactly does the word mean in a telecom context?  I’d guess there are probably 50 unique uses for the word “services” in telecom.  Unfortunately, “service” is about as descriptive a word as “thing”.

And as new, over-the-top services emerge, the vocabulary used to describe the “service provisioning” area has also become quite muddy.

Well, here’s my attempt to decipher the terms “service” and “service provisioning” more precisely:

One of the more confusing aspects of service provisioning is the policy area that Comptel is championing.  What’s interesting about policy is that while it’s enabled on the telecom side, the policy may actually be implemented and controlled in real time by the over-the-top provider.

You can be sure that in the years ahead our current definitions of what a telecom service is will be stretched dramatically as they were during the last decade.

While I’m sure my table of service terms has some flaws, perhaps you can use these definitions to spark some fruitful discussions with your peers and vendors, or here on “The Dynamics of OSS”.

In the end, I hope my definitions of telecom “service” will be of service to you :- )

Dan Baker is the research director of Technology Research Institute (TRI).   Since 1994, Baker has authored dozens of research studies in the BSS/OSS market.  He contributes articles to Vanilla Plus and writes a regular column for Billing & OSS World called Dan Baker Blog.