ALTERNATIVE METHODS FOR INTRODUCING NEW WIRELESS INTELLIGENT NETWORK SERVICES USING TRIGGERS AND QUERIES

Wireless service providers are challenging equipment vendors to help t hem meet the rigorous demands placed on them from subscribers insistin g on more functionality. Not only are subscriber bases growing at a tr emendous rate, but as subscribers become increasingly accustomed to us ing wireless phones, they are becoming more mobile and requiring more services. Expectations for services have gone beyond the need for emer gency assistance; people require the same functionality (such as messa ging, message notification, and enhanced features) that they are using on their landline phones. The wireless intelligent network (WIN) para digm 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 enhan ced services must be deployed while waiting for the standards to final ize and for equipment vendors to catch up. As the market places pressu re on the WIN architecture to improve time-to-market requirements, man y critical decisions will be made. Some key considerations that will b e discussed in this paper are where new services belong, where the tri ggers or queries should be invoked, and how standards will guide these decisions.