The battle for the living room is on. Companies from the disparate worlds of cable, media and software manufacturing, are scrambling to piece together a broadband jigsaw puzzle. One whose pieces consist of the key assets, that will eventually position them for leadership in the world, promised by fast Internet connections. As consumers demand for low-cost, high-speed access to content-heavy, bandwidth-intensive data, video and voice services over the Internet, intensify the battle for ‘living-room dominance’ for subscriber share.

They are grabbing for parts of the basic infrastructure. Cable systems, satellite partnerships as well as the packaged content that will come into high demand, once the ‘fat’ pipelines are in place to deliver bigger and richer data files, and media types, over the net.

IDC projects the number of broadband subscribers in India to be near half a million, by 2004. With such a huge wave of growth potential looming ahead, network equipment vendors are scrambling to bring a new generation of broadband access solutions to the market, for their service provider’s customers. These new systems can support multiple high-speed data, voice, and streaming video IP services, not just over one access media but over any media.

Changing Business Models

Flat rate is unsustainable

Imagine if your utility bills were the same, month after month, whether you used very little water or electricity every day, or you ran your water and your air conditioner at a full blast, 24 hours a day. You are entitled to consume as much or as little as you wish, anytime you want it. Chances are that you would not accept such a service agreement. Not only because it is not a fair arrangement, but also because such wasteful consumption would put pressure on the finite supply of water and electricity. The result would be that most of your normal demands for usage would most likely, go unfulfilled.

As high speed, broadband access deployment moves to the next stage, intense competition has created the need for all service providers to redefine business models and objectives. Serious considerations must be made to abandon certain old habits and practices left over from the early Internet frenzy days, most notably, the ‘flat rate’ fee structure. No service provider can hope to stay in business for long by continuing to offer a single, egalitarian ‘flat rate’ access service to all subscribers, regardless of actual usage.

The new paradigm for delivering IP-based services is also forcing the service providers to adopt newer business models. The retention of customers will require that a service provider offers different class of service options and associated tariffs, while guaranteeing the quality of subscribed services. ‘Back Office’ usage-based accounting and subscriber billing, becomes an important competitive differentiation in the new era of convergent IP services over the broadband networks from cable and wireless to DSL networks.

The value-added paradigm

A live and typical broadband example is that of Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel), a premier provider of domestic, international and mobile telecommunications as well as postal services. It aims to be the first truly pan-Asian total communications carrier, with a reach unmatched by any other operator in Asia-Pacific. SingTel has deployed a IP service management solutions package, ERX-1400, to offer additional value-added capabilities to its customers, such as the recently announced iTV service.

iTV is a new and an unique service combining broadcast and interactive TV programming, Internet access, e-mail, and multimedia shopping through a single intuitive interface. Users of the iTV service, now gain control of the TV programming content reaching their home by scheduling it at a time suitable for their lifestyle. The SingTel iTV service, delivered through its broadband Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) infrastructure, offers SingTel customers high-speed connectivity with interactive digital video capabilities and Internet access. The system ERX-1400 is designed to deliver hundreds of simultaneous multicast 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps video streams to SingTel subscribers, without impacting the DSL service to its DSL customers.

The initial service offerings available during the trial period are video-on-demand, scheduled program channels, electronic program guide, television commerce/home shopping and information services, etc. Additional services, such as enhanced TV, interactive gaming and interactive advertising, will be made available at a later stage.

Faced with an increased competition and price pressure for traditional transport services, service providers have turned to value-added services to create incremental revenue and increase customer loyalty. By adding value-added IP services to their service portfolio, service providers are able to enhance their attractiveness and move up the value-chain with their customers.

The Broader Issues

Broadband technologies give service providers the opportunity to offer more than one type of high-speed access. However, it also poses associated technical and economic challenges, since each broadband technology uses different network equipment over different access media:

• Digital subscriber line access multiplexer over plain old telephone wires

• Cable modem and cable modem termination system over two-way transmission hybrid fiber or co-axial cable

• Wireless head-end equipment over wireless airwaves

• The most cost effective—Ethernet on RJ45 carried through UTP and fiber

A service provider interested in offering multiple services over multiple access media, must purchase different types of equipment and deploy multiple networks for each of these services. This is extremely costly and not to mention, presents a huge operational and management challenge.

Manual is on the way out

Much of the growing demand for broadband access is going to come from individual consumers, a service provider with a manual subscriber provisioning, and management system, will quickly find his operation going out of control. A manual provisioning environment is extremely administration-demanding, time-intensive and costly. Imagine a cable operator having to involve a customer service representative, often spending several hours, each time to activate service for each subscriber!

Need for neat aggregation

One of the major attractions of broadband technologies is that they offer a large Internet access pipe that enables transmission of a huge amount of information. Cable and fixed-point wireless technologies have two important characteristics in common—both are ‘fat’ pipes that are ‘fixed’. In that, they are not readily expandable and designed to be shared by many subscribers. DSL, on the other hand, allocates a dedicated line to each subscriber. However, at its aggregation point, bandwidth also becomes ‘shared’. In other words, while the bandwidth pipe for all the three technologies is ‘broad’, it is ‘shared’ at some point, and the total bandwidth is finite. Therefore, utilization and prioritization of the usage of this ‘pipe’ necessitates efficient management.

Seamless integration, absolutely essential

A long-standing business axiom states that accountability exists only with the right measurements, and that business prospers only with the proper management information. An effective end-to-end broadband service management system must meet four major requirements:

• Automatic and dynamic subscriber provisioning The first requirement is to integrate service subscription orders and changes, automatically and dynamically, with the various processes that invoke provisioning and delivery of requested or on-demand services

• Guaranteed class and QoS The second requirement is to offer different class of services with a varying fee, and guarantee the quality of service level associated with each service class

• Data collection, warehousing and usage billing The third requirement is to capture a subscriber’s actual usage, calculating the bill based on the rate associated with the customer’s subscribed service levels

• Multiple service, multi-access media The fourth requirement is to enable the subscriber to dynamically order any service. It may be based on the time of the day or week, or premier services that support merged data, voice and video over any access broadband media. The idea is to integrate them into a single point of contact for the subscriber.

Feature Rich and Scalable

To accelerate the development cycle for network equipment suppliers, IP service management solutions providers, have developed state-of-the-art standards, compliant broadband access, enabling platforms that support multiple services over any media. These are adaptive software platform, specifically designed for network equipment vendors for rapid adaptation to their new broadband access systems.

Service providers looking for a feature-rich IP services platform, need to consider the merits of these solutions. The platform enables an array of service-provisioning capabilities and supports some of the highest in-service (i.e. live network deployments) concurrent subscriber sessions, utilizing MPLS and wire-speed throughput, enabling IP QoS and multicast capabilities.

Tremendous growth in the demand for high-speed private line services has created a need for high-capacity service provider edge devices. The new family of edge-routing switches is capable of aggregating thousands of customer leased lines in a single chassis, and forwarding this traffic on high-speed links to the Internet backbone. It also supports high-touch services, like IP QoS and VPN, while maintaining wire-speed performance on all customer connections.

Functionality bridges operational gaps

Broadband solutions are scalable and highly-adaptive architectural software platforms, designed to be easily incorporated into any network system, including cable modem systems, wireless head-end equipment and DSL Access Multiplexers (DSLAMs). It provides a set of comprehensive software functional components in a "near turnkey" package, bridging the operational gaps between the network access concentration layer and IP service layer.

Other Key Features

• Provides rapid adaptation to any existing or new broadband access network systems, thereby ensuring fast time to market

• Supports multiple front-end access services seamlessly with back office functions around a robust usage data warehouse for data collection, usage-based billing and trends analysis

• Automatic subscriber initialization and self-provisioning—a process by which a subscriber gains access to the services offered by a service provider, with minimum manual configuration by the operator

• Extensive QoS that specifies and guarantees upstream and downstream access bandwidth allocation, to arbitrate between traffic flows competing for resources and to protect higher priority services from resource depletion caused by lower priority services

• Ensures maximum interoperability by adhering and adopting industry standards wherever appropriate

• Supports multiple broadband media on the same architecture, enabling developers to incorporate one or more access media provisioning modules.

Shirish Kanitkar, CEO, Unisphere Networks India