Amirhossein Ghanbari

Business Development in the Internet of Things: A Matter of Vertical Cooperation

Smart and connected devices can improve industrial processes, and generate new and better services. While this premise is well understood within the ICT industry, there is a challenge in extending this knowledge to vertical industries. The potential of the Internet of Things lies in the interaction among industries working together toward value co-creation. Firms need to look beyond their internal business models and explore cooperative perspectives to define new business opportunities. In this article, we look into the relevance of vertical cooperation in the area of IoT and highlight the need to develop new value networks that leverage this cooperation and enable the creation of new business models. To lead our discussions, we use the examples of two major building blocks of smart cities: intelligent transport systems and health and well being services based on connected devices and solutions.

Smart Energy: Competitive landscape and collaborative business models

During the recent years several technologies and services based in Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine communications (M2M) have appeared in many different sectors, like healthcare, transport, logistics, media or utilities. When new technologies (like Smart Grid or Smart Energy) appear two types of challenges can be defined: technical and business challenges, therefore innovation has to be applied in both of them. Too often innovation is focus on the technical evolution and underestimated on the business field, however it is a key aspect for new technologies and services to reach commercial success. Traditional business models in the energy sector will suffer big changes in the next years, as the Smart Grid concept is developed. By the advent of new services and applications, horizontal and vertical partnerships with competitors and other actors will take place. In this context collaboration between actors, partnerships and agreements will be of key importance. This paper investigates the different actors involved in a Smart Energy ecosystem, its possible activities and suitable business models for the different Smart Grid building blocks or milestones.

Study on the effects of backhual solutions on indoor mobile deployment „macrocell vs. femtocell”

The deployment of low cost and low power base stations has been recognized in recent years as a promising cost-efficient solution and energy-efficient strategy. In this paper the femtocell and macrocell deployment options have been compared in the context of indoor mobile broadband deployment, with focus on the effect of different backhauling solutions in power consumption and the total deployment cost. This study has been based on the deployment of mobile broadband services within an area of one square kilometers in a new densely populated business district where the different user demands, spectrum bandwidths, backhaul technologies and radio access technologies are taken into account. Moreover, various deployment scenarios reflecting the business perspectives of mobile operators have been looked into as well. The main findings reached indicate that backhaul solutions contribute differently to cost and power consumption depending on the employed deployment strategy. However, contributions to the total power consumption and to the CapEx and OpEx elements of the total deployment cost elements turned to be more significant in the case of femtocell deployment scenarios than in the case of macrocell ones. It is worthy of notice that the femtocell deployment is more cost-efficient, especially in high demand situation when new macro sites are needed to be deployed.

MTC value network for Smart City ecosystems

Looking for new markets and revenue streams, the future Smart Cities comprise a good opportunity for traditional actors of the telecommunication industry. This opportunity requires a new mindset among these actors that corresponds to re-positioning in the Smart City value chain. This means that, in order to play a role that can not be overlooked, Telecom actors should perform rather different blocks of the Smart City value chain compared to their traditional activity blocks in Mobile Telephony value chain. The Fifth Generation of mobile telecommunications technology (5G), by some actors, is then considered as the major ICT enabler for this new paradigm. This paper intends to highlight the role of Machine Type Communications (MTC) for enabling Smart Cities. In order to do so, we introduce the building blocks of Smart City followed by four use cases from Intelligent Transport Systems and Digital Built Environment. We use these cases as the proof of concept for defining the generic MTC activities in the context of Smart City. Eventually the paper introduces the MTC value network in the context of Smart City, based on the resources associated with the activities.

Evaluation of spectrum access options for indoor mobile network deployment

The investments in indoor mobile networks are highly related to the spectrum availability and its associated authorization options. The aim of this paper is to discuss the differences in the spectrum demand taking into consideration both wide and local area network deployment requirements and the kind of actor that provides the indoor wireless access. The analysis covers different authorizations options namely licensed, unlicensed, licensed shared access (LSA) and secondary access. A quantitative approach is used to analyze the differences between macrocell and femtocell deployments focusing on deployment cost and spectrum demand. This is complemented by a qualitative study to explore and discuss the strategic business decisions of different actors in view of the available spectrum bands and spectrum authorization options. The main conclusions from this study are; spectrum has more value in macrocell deployment scenarios than in femtocell ones. More spectrum in macrocell deployment scenarios means that operators can deploy less number of new sites and exploit previous infrastructure investments. Femtocell networks are often coverage limited which allows for frequency re-use. As a consequence, the value of spectrum is not the same for mobile network operators (MNOs) and for local network operator (LNOs). MNOs are traditionally confined to macrocell deployment strategies which entail the exclusive usage of licensed bands. While, the use of licensed spectrum by LNOs may incur more cost than the cost of infrastructure deployment. This explains why the use of unlicensed bands is lucrative and viable for LNOs. Furthermore, the LSA scheme may or could soon become an enabler for LNOs business due to the prevailing technical, regulation and policies developments.

Value creation and coopetition in M2M ecosystem — The case of smart city

Wireless ICT as a subcategory of the ICT industry has long been serving end users as its direct customers. The value for end users, i.e. connectivity as the end product of this industry, has been created in a linear chain where two major group of actors have been cooperating with each other: Telecom Equipment Vendors (TEV) and Mobile Network Operators (MNO). By the demand of other industries for connecting devices/machines in order to enable various services, Machine to Machine (M2M) communications and Internet of Things have emerged as new concepts where Wireless ICT could serve other industries. As a result “connectivity” became an enabler (service) and not the final product. In this paper we argue that linear telecom value chains are incapable of serving this new demand, since wireless ICT requires to co-create value with other industries. This causes the formation of telecom value networks in which traditional telecom actors have to form new (different) business relationships with each other; Cooperation with competitors and Competition with cooperators.

Coopetition in M2M ecosystem - the case of smart cities

During recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the potential opportunities that can be attained with promoting Smart Sustainable Cities (SSC); a concept that can be reached based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The SSC concept is then considered achievable by horizontal integration of participating industries in its ecosystem in order to empower sustainability. This approach requires cooperation and sharing resources among co-existing multiple industrial verticals as well as collaboration among competitors (Coopetition). As a result, Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, as the most relevant subcategory of ICT in this context, requires proper coopetition patterns in its ecosystem. In this paper we identify the major roles (activities) in the M2M ecosystem in the context of Smart Cities. Next we define the actors who are capable of performing these roles and present a diagram showing plausible business relations among them. Eventually we discuss the complexity of resources in this context and present different forms of sharing resources among participating actors that is based on coopetition.