The Triple-Play OSS Challenge: What’ll It Take for the Large Carriers to Succeed?
Dan Baker
02/01/2006
Landing a man on the moon in 1969 was
a great technological feat.
And it was a triumph of many technologies: rocket science, computers,
telemetry and high-tech manufacturing, to
name just a few.
But technology aside, the moon shot
was also—something often overlooked—a
huge systems integration achievement. In
fact, without the 10-year effort it took
NASA to synchronize technologies,
processes and human organizations into a
workable solution, no footprints would be
on the moon today.
For the large U.S. wireline carriers,
triple play is the 21st century equivalent
of a moon shot. Yes, most of triple play’s
technology pieces already exist: WebTV,
set-top boxes, digital content, DSLAMs,
routers and OSS/BSS. But orchestrating
them all into a robust, scaleable and profitable service will take as much systems
integration finesse as putting a man on
the moon—and maybe a bit more.
To gauge the OSS readiness of large
U.S. carriers for their colossal triple-play
launches, Dittberner Associates
conducted a research investigation, interviewing executives from both carrier and
OSS vendor organizations.
Dittberner’s conclusion is that even
though U.S. carriers say they will deploy
triple play in a matter of months, the OSS
systems needed to support the market are
still in R&D mode. In Dittberner’s view it
will take five years or more of synchronization and testing of networks and
OSS systems before large-carrier, massmarket triple play is a reality.
Here are some of the bigger OSS
hurdles that Dittberner feels carriers
must overcome.
A BETTER-THAN-CABLE USER EXPERIENCE
First of all, the large U.S. carriers
cannot afford to deliver a “me too”
television experience.
If the U.S. carriers’ triple-play offering isn’t markedly stronger than the
current cable TV experience, residential subscribers will not be persuaded
to switch.
Leaping ahead of cable providers implies offering several advanced capa-
bilities, such as:
• Sophisticated video capabilities, such
as instant replay and viewing multiple TV channels on the screen at one
time.
• Near real-time charging for on-
demand content, so carriers can earn
incremental revenue.
• Real-time subscriber profiling, to
enable authentication and authorization of services and content.
• Personalization for different members
of the household, to enable parental
supervision, one-to-one marketing
and family spending control.
Raising the stakes even higher is the
need to deliver these advanced capabilities in a robust manner. In fact,
consumers will be far more finicky
about video than their other broadband
service, DSL.
Here’s the reason. When a high-
speed Internet connection goes down,
the customer shrugs it off and gets
another cup of coffee. But if a carrier’s
broadband signal for “Desperate
Housewives” goes bad, millions of viewers will suddenly
feel—well—desperate. And if the problem isn’t quickly resolved, they are apt
to phone their cable provider to sign up
again for cable TV.
The lesson here is obvious: telecoms
cannot afford to lose early customers
due to quality of service issues. If they
do, it could spell business disaster for
triple play.
SCALABILITY AND FLOW-THROUGH
We’ve been fooled into thinking that
triple play is just around the corner. But
behind the public relations façade,
many of today’s triple-play “success
stories” are struggling to scale.
Perhaps the most advanced LEC in
North America is Canada’s SaskTel, but
SaskTel now has only 35,000 consumers
accessing its DSL/copper loop triple-
play system. Comcast boasted it would
have 250,000 triple-play subscribers by
the end of 2005, but Comcast employs
900 people in Denver to provision
services and monitor/troubleshoot its
triple-play network. In other words, its
service can hardly be called profitable.
Of course, in the early stages of
launching a sophisticated service, it’s
prudent for service providers to perform
OSS tasks manually, but the leap to
automation will certainly take time.
NETWORK CAPACITY
Triple play is more than its individual
services. It’s video in the presence of
voice, voice in the presence of data, and
data in the presence of video.
And each service has its peak load
periods. In the United States, peak voice
traffic happens every year on Mother’s
Day. Video and data will also have their
peaks, so network operators must plan
ahead. And for the next few years, most
VoIP calls will terminate over the
PSTN—yet another factor to plug into
the network capacity equation.
Carriers will need to be far more
aware of network capacity and quality
issues as they expose their infrastructure
to other operators and content service
providers.
For example, what happens when
hundreds of game lovers in Atlanta
decide to jointly play the high-band-
width, multi-player on-line version of
Dungeons and Dragons? If the game is
hosted by a third-party content provider
on Verizon’s network, how does BellSouth
tweak its network to guarantee quality to
its subscribers in Atlanta? And how does
it properly monitor the network to
measure QoS?
Frankly, the ILECs are not familiar
enough with IP traffic patterns and
behavior just yet to answer these critical
network capacity questions.
SERVICE ACTIVATION AND DELIVERY
Deploying sophisticated IP and triple-
play services will call for highly flexible
and accurate service activation systems
that know the dependencies and subtle
nuances of hundreds of versions of
network devices.
Dittberner thinks Syndesis is on the
right track to deliver this capability for
SBC. But the size of the problem threatens the ability of the systems to keep up.
Special activation problems include
bandwidth management and aligning
PVCs to ensure that the right server gets
on the right virtual channel. The number
of devices requiring activation has also
exploded, from a handful of DSLAM
devices to many more softswitch and
router manufacturers. This has increased
complexity an order of magnitude and will
therefore require rigorous testing.
TECHNICIAN COORDINATION WITH NETWORK ASSURANCE
When a carrier first launches video in a
major metropolitan market like Los
Angeles, it may need to validate service
for thousands of customers in just one day.
Truck rolls are extremely costly, too, so
before you dispatch techs to the field, you
need to be doubly sure you’re not sending
them out to solve problems that the
customer could resolve by pushing a
button or two on a remote.
Field technicians will also need
portable monitoring devices that exchange
data with an integrated network monitoring system in the back office.
Simulation of customer problems is not
enough. You need actual equipment out in
the remote DSLAMs to test the real
customer’s experience. In Spirent’s
approach to the problem, a single probe at
the DSLAM monitors an estimated 100 to
200 home subscribers.
NETWORK INVENTORY AND PROVISIONING
The legacy copper network remains a
bottleneck—particularly for SBC, which
is advocating a fiber-to-the-neighborhood
and DSL-to-the home strategy for triple-
play access.
No surprise here: order tasks that
touch the copper network will still need to
access older Telcordia systems, many of
which are not fully mechanized. When a
consumer initially orders a triple-play
service, for instance, a dip into legacy
inventory and facilities systems is necessary to accommodate changes to the
physical plant, such as running DSL to
the home.
But as new services are added to the
connection—say, adding video service to
voice over IP—inventory will play less of
a role, and the service delivery system
will keep track of subscriber changes and
capacity issues.
In Dittberner’s view, the most
compelling approach to bridging the old
and new OSSs is Telcordia’s model of web-based access to a federation of provi-
sioning systems with accompanying asset
inventory.
CUSTOMER SELF-PROVISIONING AND THE CALL CENTER
The triple-play interface with the
customer is also cause for concern. The
issue is how to greatly simplify the interface so the average television user can
understand the various ordering and preference options.
No matter how well the triple-play web
portal is designed, IPTV will surely
prompt a high level of call center
inquiries, particularly as consumers first
install the service. And managing the
triple-play call center will be tricky.
Up to now, of course, telecoms have
divided customer service into separate
silos—voice call center, DSL call center,
wireless call center—for one good reason:
the amount of call center rep training
required for each of these service areas is
substantial.
Triple play will force call center reps
and technicians of many stripes to handle
voice, video and data issues in one call
center. From a training standpoint, that’s
quite a challenge.
OSS VENDOR COORDINATION AND LACK OF EXPERIENCE
Because no single vendor has experience
delivering triple play on a scale involving
millions of subscribers, carriers are using
a divide-and-conquer strategy. At SBC,
Alcatel is responsible for IPTV integration and the network; Amdocs is the lead
billing, CRM and order management
player; and Syndesis is managing provisioning. Responsibility for service
assurance will probably fall on the shoulders of Agilent, Micromuse and others.
In a mixed-vendor environment like
this, the need for vendor coordination is
extraordinary. And given the lack of experience, many things are learned along the
way—meaning much more time is needed
to regroup and double-back after choosing the wrong path.
In Dittberner’s view, mass-market
triple play can succeed, but it will take
far more time than the large U.S. carriers
are willing to admit.
Along the way, the decades-old OSS
integration problem will certainly come
to a head, because triple play demands
it be solved. Wireline, cable and wireless operators all face the same
problem. Regardless of how different
the elements are in their networks, the
same complexity is overwhelming. It’s
the lack of interoperability among the
systems, the disparate networks, and the
organizations that run them all.
Clearly, moving toward a common
OSS framework or service-oriented
architecture will help. But just as
important is the need for a powerful
systems integrator—a lion tamer who’s
not afraid to crack the whip over a growing menagerie of OSS vendors.
Dan Baker is director of Dittberner's
OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase, an annual
research service. Prior to joining
Dittberner Baker founded Technology
Research Institute (telecomOSS.com) and
has been analyzing the OSS/BSS market
since 1994. Email: info@dittberner.com
Email this article
Add a comment
Printer version
Order reprints
RSS Feed
Bookmark article