Until recently, mobile operators have focused on connecting what was essentially a classic Internet service model, which included content provisioning from multiple sources, with the architectures and limitations of traditional, voice-oriented telecommunications infrastructures.

First, telecommunications application development involved the use of particular protocols specific to the industry, which led to a reliance on scarce and expensive skills. These standards often varied in small but important ways from region to region and equipment supplier to equipment supplier, adding to the costs of solution development and integration.

Second, because of organic industry growth and consolidation of much of the telecommunications industry - and the requirement to continue to inter-work with legacy systems - systems development often took a silo approach to new initiatives. This added more layers of complexity to an already complex world and resulted in location systems that had to be shoehorned in to work alongside existing switching, billing and operations support systems, which culminated in attendant errors, vulnerabilities and inefficiencies.

Finally, reliance on the familiar, network-centric worldview of telecommunications caused headaches when it came to solving issues of scalability and security - especially when third parties were involved in the content and service chain. Systems, business and technology cultures that had grown up with straightforward voice services - provided largely on credit and regular billing - found themselves strained when coping with multi-party payment flows, pre-paid services, differentiated pricing models, and a richer portfolio of offered services.