The Challenges Of Voice-Over-Broadband Service Management.

A variety of factors have combined to drastically elevate the complexity of the network environment for service providers. Deregulation of the telephone network, followed by the entrance of brand new service provider competitors, combined with the rapid deployment of new and increasingly complex elements into the network have changed the task of network management integration.

In this new environment, service providers must be able to minimize operational costs despite the increasing complexity of new services. They must also be able to easily deploy and bill for services in an environment where they share unbundled elements. Both require a new model for network management, and more specifically what we'll call element management. A brief history of the existing telco network may help give context to the overarching changes service providers are facing in taking advantage of new VOIP.

The Legacy Telephone Network

Traditionally, service providers voice networks have been populated with hardware that boasts a product life cycle of 10 years or more. The hardware is designed first for the highest degrees of reliability, and is typically supplied by a single vendor. As a result, voice services represent the most reliable technology most people use every day.

Two things happened to disrupt this seemingly "failsafe" network: increased data traffic, and competition. The use of the Internet via dial-up connections began rising in importance and consuming considerable bandwidth on the failsafe network designed specifically for 2 to 3 minute call durations. Suddenly, the existing switching infrastructure was being overloaded with atypical traffic, stressing the network.

At the same time, competitive pressure as a result of the 1996 Telecommunications Act finally began to get the telephone companies' attention. New competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) began to compete for customers with lower cost services and new voice and data bundles based on broadband access technologies. Soon, the single-vendor, monolithic service delivery platforms deployed by service providers over the last several decades began to seem limiting, and service providers started to face competition in their own regions, as well as new opportunities to go out of region.

Monolithic switching platforms from Nortel, Lucent, Siemens and Alcatel, by their very natures, limit service providers' ability to differentiate and rapidly deploy new services. Since all of the major telcos are using the same variety of Class 5 switch--and each switch includes a "generic" upgrade, available to all customers of that product every two or three years--incumbent telephone companies were left with very little but price cuts as a strategy for customer retention. Naturally, they began to reevaluate their options.

IP And Next Generation Switching

While service providers began to contemplate their options in this rapidly changing environment, one of the biggest issues on the table was how to take advantage of the massive rate of progress being made in the IP world. New technology was being introduced and improved upon almost continually in the data world. Service providers needed a strategy for using technology within the existing telephone network framework to build a platform for immediate differentiation, and a staffing point for the creation of new revenue sources.

The challenge facing service providers was two-fold. First, they had to adhere to the same reliability standards their customers expected, and the new technologies coming out of the data world were not built to support the telephone network's reliability. Second, the new technology was more complex and typically required equipment from multiple vendors. Integrating the new technology into the existing network without disrupting service and increasing operational costs required an enormous effort.

Voice Over Broadband

Service providers' most significant fear of new technology often rests on the premise that it will cause so much disruption in the network that it will negate the new revenue the technology creates. Voice over broadband is an unprecedented change in traditional network design that offers a multitude of benefits to the service provider, but only if the technology can be seamlessly integrated into the existing call and data management system.

Voice over broadband leverages the broadband networks being deployed by existing and new service providers to deliver packetized voice services. A single broadband connection can carry multiple lines of toll-quality voice, significantly decreasing the amount of dedicated copper needed to serve customers, and acting as a platform for delivering new, packet based-services.

Voice over broadband networks require a voice gateway and an integrated customer premise access device in addition to the existing broadband network (DSLAM and ATM Switch). All of this equipment is typically supplied by different vendors. As a result of this complexity, provisioning and maintaining the new voice over broadband services to turn them into, revenue machines requires a sophisticated management scheme that works within the service providers existing management frame- work and operating system.

This is true for all of the elements in the network, regardless of which vendor manufactured it. Let's take the voice over broadband gateway as an example. The voice gateway must have its own element management system (EMS) that takes advantage of the power of the technology while making its complexity transparent to the service provider. The voice gateway EMS allows service providers to perform the full range of management activities on the gateway that are necessary for operations, administration and maintenance of voice over broadband services. The operator must be able to manage the equipment regardless of its location, whether it is at the central office or network operations center.

The role of the EMS in the voice gateway is to control and manage the gateway to ensure maximum usage of its resources. The EMS then extracts relevant aspects of the detailed knowledge it has of the gateway into an information model that communicates the information via the northbound interface to higher-level management systems. The end result is a significant potential cost savings and revenue generation opportunity for service providers, making the EMS an invaluable part of the network.

Enabling Flow-Through Provisioning

One of the most important roles of the EMS in the new network environment is to ensure flow-through provisioning. The overall objective of flow through provisioning architecture is to automate the provisioning of new services, eliminating costly, time-consuming, and error-prone manual processes while enabling service providers to benefit from the revenue generated by customer access to on-demand services.

The direct benefits of flow-through provisioning are realized from the following changes to the conventional service provider model:

* Reduction if not elimination of truck rolls in the provisioning of CPE.

* Dramatic reduction in the number of customer service representatives required.

* Elimination of the latency between service requests and the delivery of service.

* Virtual elimination of technical intervention in the service provisioning process.

* Elimination of perceived complexity in ordering services.

* Elimination of errors due to manual processes.

* Lowered barrier to impulse buying of services.

While new technology like voice over broadband represents an opportunity for incumbent service providers, the challenge of integrating new technology into a multi-vendor network requires a more sophisticated product strategy from the technology vendors, and a very well thought out integration strategy on the part of the service providers. New technology, no matter how exciting, can only be a significant market force if the hardware and software enabling it also provide a means to provision, maintain and bill for the new service.

Anticipating these requirements, working within the limitations of the existing network, and providing products that meet the reliability requirements of service providers are the challenges for hardware vendors in the new network environment. The challenge for the service provider is to adopt new technology pragmatically, in a way that adds value, reduces customer churn, and grows the revenue base, without forcing too much risk on the existing model.

Sean Parham is the vice president of product management at General Bandwidth (Austin, TX).