What are the advantages of SOA for telecommunications?

The use of SOA standards offer many benefits for the telecommunications industry. They enable providers to:

• achieve a homogeneous environment that
  spans time-sensitive and traditional IT services;
• expose the
  underlying value of the network to IT applications while allowing the
  network to access IT services;
• hide the complexity and heterogeneity of underlying networks;
• accelerate service creation and delivery;
• open
  network platform capabilities to third parties;
• support
  multi-vendor, multi-technology middleware platforms; and
• simplify the use of services and devices through personalization and
  customization