 customer retention: To attract and retain them, win adequate market share, and drive profits, CSPs must develop and make the best advantage of customer care and billing systems. Without these systems, which provide the ability to not only bill but also to mon- itor the purchasing behavior of the customer and respond to it, CSPs can- not respond fast enough to maintain a leading position among their competitors. Key to their survival is the migration from being providers of traditional flat-rate, dial-up access to the Internet to being providers of richly contextual, just-in-time, user-specific services such as VoIP; fax over IP; voice over xDSL; video and audio content streaming; video e-mail; electronic gaming; and text, audio, and video instant messaging. Of course, these services are fundamentally dependent on the availabil- ity of broadband access because they are bandwidth intensive. The com- bination of rapid response and bandwidth availability are two critical components. A third, naturally, is critical mass in the market. Successful customer acquisition and retention strategies will be crucial in the medium to long term. Finally, provisioning these services in a way that makes them profitable is the last piece of the puzzle. Billing algorithms may need to change as this evolution occurs: Today most services are billed on a flat-rate basis; in the future a combination of flat rate and measured billing may become the norm. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Telecom Market Segments Chapter 8 If we assume that this model of access, application, and content is valid-that is, that successful companies in the CSP space will comprise some combination of these three elements-then we can identify and speak to the characteristics of each element. Under the purview of the CSPs are found a collection of company types including the w