Converged service continuity: A challenge for the merchant and the architect

Offering service continuity is about providing customers with ubiquitous, uninterrupted, and transparent access to personalized content and services, both when they move between various access networks and when it is desirable to continue a session on another terminal at any time. The novelty does not only lie in new functional implementation, but in new business and distribution models as well. To make this vision a reality, the merchant and the architect must work jointly. Service continuity thus strives to eliminate barriers created by access conditions and user terminals, in response to generalization of the user-centric paradigm. The variety of existing technical environments, however, involves constraints that raise new operational challenges for the realization of communication and media service continuity. Moreover, bringing service continuity to the market depends on forward-looking business models based on interplay among actors in the market.