What role can blockchain technology play in IoE monetization, management and trust?
As Service Providers transform to become 2020 CSPs, blockchain technology has critical capabilities to support pragmatic and effective ways to monetize the IoE services, ensuring security and privacy for all stakeholders, creating successful partnerships and innovative business models to enable the new opportunities.
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Read the latest thought leadership and insights on blockchain technology
What is Blockchain?
Wikipedia defines a blockchain as “a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of data records secured from tampering and revision…Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block.” In this way, this technology has a critical part to play in establishing trust, with it’s immutable audit trail.
Blockchain is best known for its use as the public ledger for bitcoin transactions but it has many applications beyond this – from transparency in the food chain to reinventing banking and transforming the energy industry.
There are big opportunities for communications service providers too. Analysys Mason outlines nine areas where telecoms operators could deploy blockchain technology. These include use cases for internal BSS/OSS processes (such as billing, eSIM provisioning and number portability databases) and value-added services. They could include micropayment-based business models for digital assets, including music, mobile games, gift cards and loyalty points. This plays into the ability to innovate with new business models for digital services – essentially enabling the multi-sided platform economy.
A roadmap of innovation with TM Forum
TM Forum’s Internet of Everything (IoE) program is leading the way with collaboration, thought leadership and innovation to investigate use cases, solutions, models and templates for the role of blockchain in IoE monetization, management and trust. The key initiatives and activities are:
- Applied Innovation: Investigate the role of blockchain technology in Catalysts and incubators
- IoE Roadmap of Challenges: Correlate blockchain solutions with specific challenges
- Monetization and Management: Demonstrate use cases that prove blockchain value in improving monetization and management
- Trust, Security & Privacy: Demonstrate blockchain benefits in use cases that highlight the role of blockchain in establishing support for trust
- Partners: Develop jointly-produced models and templates that connect IoE Monetization, Management and Trust with adjacent topics, e.g smart contracts, computational law.
- Sandbox: Provide an online lab environment (sandbox) that supports the above activities
Turning insights into outcomes
The outcomes of the TM Forum blockchain work will have the capability to support new services (in areas such as, for example, trust-as-a-service) or provide other benefits such as reductions in transaction costs. However, the critical piece is the speed at which stakeholders in the communications industry move on these monetization, management and trust initiatives. The tangible outcomes of the online lab environment will be:
| Actions | Tangible outcomes |
|---|---|
| Provide a collection of blockchain components and examples | Members jointly identify, explore, and contribute scenarios developed hands-on in an environment complementary to private or proprietary labs. |
| Focus on pragmatic implementation of relevant use cases | Results are relevant and immediately useful to members. |
| Improve techniques for monetization, management and trust using blockchain and related technologies | Make specific, actionable connections between blockchain aspects and core program objectives. |
| Demonstrate and experiment with integration using TM Forum Open APIs and Frameworx | Demonstrate the use of TM Forum assets in real blockchain scenarios. |
| Emphasize co-creation, co-design, quick prototyping | Demonstrate the unique opportunities of multi-company collaboration in the TM Forum lab. |
