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IMS & Wireless Help Marginalized LECs

According to In-Stat, wireline carriers are under attack from every direction these days. It seems the future is wireless and fixed-line operators are becoming marginalized. To compete, their networks must be upgraded, new services introduced and a whole new carrier business model embraced. IMS may be the vision of the NGN, but it's too early to tell. All of this may be true, but there are near term opportunities that wireline carriers can pursue without a forklift replacement to their existing business.

In-Stat research confirms that the enterprise branch office and SMB market segments prefer buying from service providers. They prefer a single supplier. Some favor hosted services, most don't. Remote monitoring may be a requirement, but on-site management is very common. Across nearly all sizes of business, there is universal agreement that a multi-service voice/data gateway device should be part of the solution.

The creation of a new product segment that In-Stat calls the "Multi-Service Business Gateway" represents an opportunity for wireline carriers to expand their SMB market presence by offering a pre-engineered, on-premise, multi-service device, bundled with broadband transport and managed services. Such a hybrid CPE/hosted solution can help bridge the gap between traditional SMB bundles and next-generation carrier services that extend business system functions across the WAN.

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