Here is a wrap-up of highlights from the 2010 B/OSS World Conference & Expo.

Do Verizon and AT&T form a de facto national duopoly for broadband? Verizon for one, says no, unsurprisingly, but critics say the impending 4G rollouts highlight a competitive crisis for rural carriers in particular.

I am happy to say that what came to Washington, D.C., last week was a bevy of prepared, knowledgeable and entertaining speakers and a parade of solution-laden exhibitors and, as it turns out, more attendees than we had last year.

Consumers want access to be free. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve led them there with unlimited, all-you-can-eat access plans.

We Yanks managed to pull out a draw in our opener against England in the World Cup. It wasn’t a beautiful win, but it was something to keep us going for a little while at least. This is also a fair assessment of the state of billing and OSS transformation in telecom today.

Accanto Systems has announced that a partnership with distributor Phoenix Datacom resulted in the win of a contract with a global service provider for their European subsidiaries serving business customers.

Ah, the cloud. As one person put it, “after a lot of drinks the cloud becomes clear.” Not so much, actually.

The elimination of intercarrier compensation and the USF as we know it is imminent. The FCC's associate chief of the wireline competition bureau explains why the move is necessary.

Sam Phillips missed a golden opportunity and so did we by not having the cameras rolling at a number of B/OSS World sessions.

Debra Osswald is IBM’s global communications industry strategy leader. She spends a majority of her strategy cycles on the Cloud. And based on the results IBM has seen from its own internal cloud initiative, she is convinced the opportunity for communications service providers is significant and imminent. Osswald will deliver a keynote address at B/OSS World on Friday.

In his Friday keynote, AT&T’s strategy guru for business services will tell you the cloud is a clear winner for carriers.

Pitney Bowes says Spectrum Technology Platform v6.4 arms providers with a comprehensive, modular platform for enterprise-wide data quality, data integration and location intelligence.

Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO at Canadian operator TELUS, took to the keynote stage at the Billing & OSS World Conference to discuss how to handle subscriber identity, and how being a dump pipe isn’t a bad thing.

Remember when we were all a-gog about IMS? We just couldn’t get enough. IMS’ bloom faded long ago, but now we finally have a new word that rivals its level of buzz: “Customer-centricity.”

It never ceases to amaze me that with all the hot topics being bandied about in telecom software these days, that one of the most popular topics is e-billing. More specifically, it is about how you get folks to adopt it.

Communications service providers (CSPs) in all regions of the world and across residential broadband, mobile and enterprise business services are implementing policy management systems to enhance services using next-generation network technologies.

The formula for success used to be simple: Provide a quality service at an affordable price, supported by exemplary customer service, and you’re a winner. But nothing is simple anymore. The RCA's Steven K. Berry laid it out in his keynote address.

An independent study by Sterling Commerce on IT spending priorities in telecom shows that 80 percent of companies feel the recession is over or almost over.

Alliance Telecom Solutions has announced a marketing partnership with Extropy Group, started a new professional networking group and announced its upcoming Webinar schedule.

Synaptitude has become a professional services partner for order-to-cash processes for Martin Dawes Analytics.

The new industry study examines the ternds and expenses for nearly 30 billion long-distance call detail records.

The company says Dynamic Decisioning 5.0 uses real-time business rules and policy management driven by valuable customer data to help reduce costs, optimize revenue opportunities, and dramatically increase satisfaction and loyalty.

Carriers can leverage policy functions as a way to become more customer-centric, not just for network management. It's a critical evolution as the world of third-party content expands, along with smart devices and new business models.

Who will win out when it comes to the fairest operational and service enablement implementations in all the telecom land? We’ll find out on Wednesday, June 9, during the evening’s B/OSS Excellence Awards ceremony.

We need to stop talking about smart vs. dumb pipes, because that’s not the question. It’s not about pipes, it’s about content.

MetraTech says its multi-vertical approach is helping it win deals you’re not.

PLUS, Albania's newest mobile network operator, will launch its network later this year using a bundled product offering from Comverse.

Billing behemoth Amdocs will provide a full BSS suite to VoIP operator Vonage Holdings Corp. under a five-year, managed services agreement. The agreement covers the support of Vonage's U.S., Canadian and United Kingdom operations.

Redknee is advising operators to review how they are providing transparent billing as regulatory attention and the evolution toward 3G networks and beyond begins to pick up pace, or risk damaging bill shock for customers.

Pitney Bowes is showcasing the newest versions of its EngageOne Interactive and DOC1 software for document generation this week at Billing & OSS World. Carriers can leverage them for billing and other customer communications.

Tiered billing. That phrase has a sense of finality, doesn’t it? But AT&T, which just implemented it, and anyone else who follows its lead, might have a bumpy road ahead. It’s just bad juju, as far as I’m concerned.

Billing and its related functions are often seen as, well, boring. Unchanging. Staid. But change is afoot, big change, and there are plenty of new and dare we say exciting things to look forward to in the billing realm.

Telcordia has launched a new product, Bandwidth Manager, to help service providers manage their bandwidth in a way that focuses not just on the network but on customer-driven policy capabilities.

CCS is talking up its acquisition of Sea-Net Holdings Inc. (ZDI) this week at the B/OSS World show in Washington D.C., a merger that has created a print-and-mail behemoth.

TEOCO has been given a patent for its XTrak technology, a digital invoice solution for invoice automation for communication service providers that handles virtually any file format.

Business process management specialist Pegasystems Inc. is announcing the launch of its Communications Foundation solution at Billing & OSS World, which accelerates applications development by providing an immediately usable library of pre-defined data elements and the ability to model relationships between elements.

Check out our top-10 list of reasons why people are attending the B/OSS Conference & Expo this week. You might discover an opportunity you didn't know was here!

The services landscape is ever more complex, cloud-based and mobile, demanding fresh and innovative approaches to operations in order to avoid drowning in the details and losing out competitively.

The iPhone 4G launches this week. At the risk of sounding like an aging hippie on one of those crystals-and-vortexes tours of Sedona, Ariz., it reminds me that people’s smartphone-related joy and spirit and individualism will soon kick-start a new OSS gold rush.

Would anyone notice if the pontiff wore no clothes?

Yankee Group strengthens expertise in network software systems and strategy as telecom marketing and operations software expert Susan McNeice joins the company as vice president of software research.

Connectiv Solutions unveils its netCLARUS cloud-based network intelligence and analytics suite at Billing & OSS World.

Microtronix has signed an agreement for Marben Products to distribute its Access 3000/4000 X.25/TCP-IP gateways worldwide.