SureWest, Paul Bunyan Telephone Tackle IPTV Challenges

Change has become a sometimes empty catch phase in this political season, but there’s nothing empty about how change will affect telephone companies, whether urban or rural, CLEC or ILEC. Telcos must change their view of operations and become full service providers, offering video entertainment and, if necessary, restructuring the already complex back office to handle a new pile of operational, provisioning and billing challenges.

Done correctly, these changes will allow telcos to pick up a little spare change and increase ARPU by properly and promptly billing video subscribers for services like pay-per-view, VoD and premium channels — to say nothing of applications that eventually will be provisioned along with entertainment.

Beyond simply staying alive in a competitive atmosphere, changing the mindset of a traditional telco to a full service provider can make the difference between leading and following the cable competition.

For telcos, no matter their size or geography, this change should be incremental, said Reed Majors, marketing consultant for Minerva Networks. Minerva is an IPTV infrastructure provider trying to guide its customers into the video space amid high expectations of what IP means to traditionally straightforward entertainment delivery.

Here Comes IPTV 2.0

Everyone talks about going to IPTV 2.0 and putting third-party applications on the television set, whether it’s Internet widgets like weather and stock quotes or communications applications like caller ID, voice mail or SMS. “[But] Minerva thinks there’s a middle ground where providers leverage what they have to increase penetration,” Majors said.

That calls for getting the back office straightened out so that when a service is offered, it can be provisioned and billed promptly and without hassle. It doesn't mean adding another level of complexity to that operation; it means layering in new video provisioning and interfacing with existing OSS/BSS and billing systems.

First, you need the management tools in place. Whether they’re actually integrated at that point with your billing and CRM system or not doesn't matter, Majors said. “You need to create all your packages, price all those packages, create different bundles based on market data you’ve collected and get the set-top boxes set up so they can leave the warehouse and get installed.”

It’s not like turning up a new voice feature and offering it to the masses.

“It’s less complex than the telephone provisioning we do today because of the myriad different products and services that can fall within that telephone service,” said Matt Riley, director of business solutions for SureWest Communications, taking what some would say is a contrarian view.

It is also a view that SureWest puts into practice. For example, the company built its own CRM system. Its own internal IT development shop customizes best-of-breed off-the-shelf applications with its own internally developed applications “to get an end-to-end suite that gives us an overall flow-through system for OSS,” Riley said.