"Sell me your children"

When 'Joliet' Jake Blues (John Belushi) leaned over towards the nervous, preppy, wealthy diners at the upscale Chez Paul restaurant and asked them "How much for the little girl? How much for the women?" - they (and a part of us) were appalled.

When Hutchinson 3G and T-Mobile, as well as Orange and Vodafone, announced they were going to share their 3G networks, a lot of equipment vendors, and analysts were similarly startled.

A small part of the telecom community was not surprised, as there are a lot of benefits to sharing infrastructure and the data it generates.

However, many providers have not been good at developing successful business models built around sharing. The failure of so many US based MVNOs compared with similar efforts in Europe, and the issues in merging the different technologies involved in the Sprint PCS and Nextel merger, caution us.

In the IP world the spectacular growth of Web 2.0 applications, social networks, and mashups have shown that sharing is a model worth pursuing, and the more enlightened service providers recognize this.

The network is a rich source of data, that has value if shared. The presence information from your mobile could be shared with your significant other's IM client or made visible on your Facebook status. Tim O'Reilly recently mused in a New York Times Op-ed contribution "... what if this phone company opened up its databases to developers of software applications? We could soon see mash-ups of your call history with the address books from your personal computer, your telephone and your social network. Now imagine a user community turned loose to annotate that data."

Knowing who their subscribers are, what they like to do, where they physically are, and sharing that information responsibly, in real-time, to add value, is what TeleSciences' Business Integration Appliance Services enables - it's not the same as selling your children.

For a beautiful visualization of shared network data, take a look at how New York city breathes with voice and IP at the New York Talk Exchange exhibition at MOMA, designed by the SENSEable City Laboratory folks from MIT.