Paper ctte2010 uz tid

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Business Models Approach for QoE Optimized Service Delivery
José Ignacio Aznar, Sidnei de Oliveira Guerra*, María José Pérez*, José Antonio Simarro*, and Miguel Hernández

Department of Electronics Engineering and Communications - University of Zaragoza Department of Techno-Economic and Performance Analysis of Networks and Services - Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo*

Abstract—Current business models are not able to cover neither customer expectances in terms of quality and personalization nor the needs and requirements of content providers, which do not find the proper means to reach the customer in a satisfactory way. Moreover, network, service and equipment providers are missing the opportunity to increase their revenues derived from the integration of a more suitableQoEbased model in their frameworks. The challenge to integrate a QoE based model relies on the partnerships and alliances among players in the value chain. We propose a QoE wholesale business model approach which comprises the main guidelines and directives to successfully integrate QoE in a scalable way. We take into account the regulator environment and we evaluate the retailer market willingnessto pay for QoE personalized services. We also explain how players could share revenue in a collaborative strategy for QoE optimized service delivery. Index Terms—Wholesale business, regulatory, QoE, revenue share. retailer business,

I. INTRODUCTION In today's new age of communications, business players involved in the value chain are facing major changes in user’s consumption trends due to thehighly increasing usage of reach media services (mainly video) together with a tendency of more personalized usage patterns. The overall result is that service and network providers (telecommunication and cable operators, and ISP) are expected to handle much higher traffic levels, while offering improved quality to the customers and remaining financially competitive. In other words, while networkevolution and investment are required, providers must find the right business models to balance that investment with new revenue streams to ultimately satisfy users' demands for new applications and service quality and reliability. Despite that the issue is not limited by technology, the current environment is not conducive to achieve this goal. Regarding [1], today’s broadband frameworks do noteven use
This paper was supported partially within the framework of the EUREKA CELTIC RUBENS project.

the available QoS mechanisms and just offer best-effort residential Internet. On one hand, the emergent growth of video-based content demands for an enhanced network reliability and resilience to maximize availability. Nextgeneration photonic network architectures [2] [3] capable of absorbinggreat increases of traffic with automatic failover rerouting have been implemented for an effective problem resolution. On the other hand, application and content providers will need a complex network infrastructure to support a significant growth in the availability of sophisticated data centre and content distribution services for delivering the experience that users demand and increasing thevalue of their services (i.e., location, presence, QoS, security). In this context, wholesale relationships will become more important and more common among business players in the telecommunication industry, supporting an even greater range of services offered to customers. From an economical perspective, the main difficulty hereby for network providers is that customers do not perceive theadvantages of QoE enhanced services and still remain reluctant to pay substantially more than what they used to pay before. Therefore, real world-players are tied to traditional B2C business models based on flat rates avoiding the risk that a mind shift entails. One possible alternative could be a model based on revenue share which is one of the most common web 2.0 business models. Internet players...