Standards Watch : Parlay Unifies IP and IT

In June, Sprint announced it will use Parlay as the mechanism for unifying its long distance, wireline and mobile services under its OneSprint strategy.

This is just one in a recent avalanche of announcements about new Parlay servers, gateways and applications.

“Success will depend on whether people will conduct payments for Web services via operators,” says Mark Leclerc, service layer business advocate at Ericsson and chairman of Parlay’s marketing work group.

In Europe and Asia, where prepay is big and credit hard to come by, operators have begun to think out of the box in order to gain a bigger share of each customer’s budget. Some have figured out how to capitalize on their role as a trusted third party by becoming an intermediary between customers and untrusted sources.

In Croatia, for example, where people are reluctant to carry cash, a telephone company seized the opportunity to offer customers the ability to prepay for parking via their mobile handsets. Through an SMS containing the number of the parking space, customers trigger an authorization number to be sent back to the phone to be displayed for the parking attendant.

That principle has caught on in Northern Europe, where people reserve their seats at movie theaters via their cell phones.

Enter Parlay

For such applications to succeed, operators need to strike a balance between their needs as telecom operators and their needs as service providers, or facilitators, to resellers. Carrier networks have been a limiting factor for new services, because of the proprietary nature of their core technology.

Telecom relies on intelligent networking, which requires “stateful overview,” so that carriers can constantly monitor what happens to calls from beginning to end, says Leclerc. However, in IT, IP protocols are best-effort query-response models.

According to Leclerc, Parlay will bridge the gap between IP and IT.

To unify these two different worlds, a unified framework and set of gateways, servers and applications are necessary. “Parlay does so by providing a single, common interface that enables people to write applications for services, and function without a detailed understanding of the underlying network, whether GSM, CDMA or others,” says Leclerc. He explains that Parlay restructures the service network in a way that will facilitate the creation of applications that utilize both IT and IP principles.

Parlay achieves that by creating APIs that sit between the core network’s control layer and the services/application layer. That enables programmers to design applications without an intimate understanding of the core network, and it allows carriers to support applications from other parties without exposing their networks.

Thus far, Parlay has defined 12 types of carrier application services that third parties can subscribe to, including connectivity management, account management, user interaction, mobility management, data session control, policy management, terminal capabilities, framework, call control and content-based charging.

Early criticisms of the cost and amount of work necessary to implement CORBA security, which was used for initial Parlay releases, have spawned Parlay X and Parlay Web services, now emerging for second-level abstraction.

Now that the Parlay group has put an abstraction layer at the top of the core network, so that signaling protocols cannot be manipulated, says Leclerc, “there is the hope that uptake will hit critical mass.”