Consumers the world over are quite content and thrilled to bits with ‘Triple Play’ (not in the baseball sense!) services that generally include IP Television (IPTV (News - Alert)), Voice over IP (VoIP), and higher speed broadband, and many multiple service providers have been ramping infrastructure to cope with this growing demand.

Now also becoming popular is ‘Quadruple Play (News - Alert),’ which adds mobile services to the existing triumvirate of IPTV, VoIP and higher speed broadband.

Telecommunications companies have chalked out clear cut roadmaps to include digital social and business activities in the not too distant future, according to a market research report from Frost & Sullivan, based on Quad Play studies conducted throughout 2008.

"Service providers are keen to be relevant to their target customers by offering connectivity, entertainment and information services,” said Yiru Zhong, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Analyst in Europe for Frost and Sullivan. “The second main force is the shift toward a digitalised society in which end users increasingly conduct their lives in a digitally connected world."

Sources claim that this new development includes the two trends mentioned above by Zhong, and hinges around the recently found expression, ‘The Internet of Things,’ which envisages that all devices and objects all over the world will eventually be connected together by an Internet Network. This system even includes books, cans and, well, anything and everything, and allows, for example, a person setting out for home from work to remotely activate water heating to have a warm, low carbon footprint bath on arrival and can even request a home aid robot to prepare a snack of sorts. The Internet of Things sees every individual being surrounded by at least 1,000 to 5,000 ‘connected’ objects, and the Internet itself should be able to encode and track 50 to 100,000 billion objects simultaneously.

Another catch word that somewhat applies to this scenario is ‘Hyperconnectivity,’ which according to Nortel, is achieved when the number of connectivity resources such as devices, nodes, and applications actually connected to the network outnumbers the consumers who use the network. The devices are as varied as PC’s, PDA’s, cell phones, iPods, cameras, sensors, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, cars, appliances, medical equipment, industrial machinery, and even irrigation equipment on farmlands.

"We have only just witnessed one of the first few concrete steps toward pushing for a connected home reality - the leadership from telecoms from the point of view of network investments and service broadening is an important catalyst to kickstart the journey beyond Quad Play scenarios," said Zhong.

The Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) report claims that revenues to telecoms and pay TV service providers reached more than $ 288 billion by end 2008, and are projected to reach at least $ 312 billion by end 2013 precisely because of services such as Quad Play and beyond, and especially newer services such as IP TV.

The research analysts from the company cited the example of France Telecom (News - Alert), whose IPTV customers made up 25 percent of France Telecom's retail ADSL subscribers in the first quarter of 2009, and that it gained a 13 percent market share via its Orange TV’s pay TV business model with localized Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) up to $ 44.2. Prepaid subscribers increased to 17 million, and the post paid subscriber base dipped to under 8 million.

The company claims that France Telecom was able achieve the mentioned figures because of the execution of its priorly planned and strategic growth road map, which included third party alliances. It has captured the loyalty of its customers by also enabling them to interact freely with company content and within provided social groupings, said analysts, and is now in a position to monetize the relationship.

Frost says that for business modules to sustain beyond Quad Play, the market players will have to form alliances and make concerted, collaborative efforts in order to maximize revenue streams. Collaborative efforts, which are in keeping with one of the seven mantras of the time, require organizations to make serious efforts to reach out and work with each other. The seven guidelines for succeeding in current economic environment are collectively called the CES (News - Alert) 7 and were pronounced and initiated at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2009.