Alternative methods for introducing new wireless intelligent network services using triggers and queries
Donna M. Hlavacek, Robert J. Zurawski · Bell Labs Technical Journal · 2002
Wireless service providers are challenging equipment vendors to help them meet the rigorous demands placed on them from subscribers insisting on more functionality. Not only are subscriber bases growing at a tremendous rate, but as subscribers become increasingly accustomed to using wireless phones, they are becoming more mobile and requiring more services. Expectations for services have gone beyond the need for emergency assistance; people require the same functionality (such as messaging, message notification, and enhanced features) that they are using on their landline phones. The wireless intelligent network (WIN) paradigm is key to helping service providers offer new enhanced services, but equipment vendors have not been able to keep up with requests for new triggers and protocols that the market demands in order to provide enhanced services. To address the urgency for quicker time-to-market and ubiquitous service offerings, alternative means of providing enhanced services must be deployed while waiting for the standards to finalize and for equipment vendors to catch up. As the market places pressure on the WIN architecture to improve time-to-market requirements, many critical decisions will be made. Some key considerations that will be discussed in this paper are where new services belong, where the triggers or queries should be invoked, and how standards will guide these decisions.