The most immediate benefits of the OSS trend have to do with automation of the provisioning process for high-speed data services. Vendors are taking advantage of the uniform authentication, registration and other procedures inherent in the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS).
"Things have come a long way [in the area of cable OSS], and a cornerstone of that was the two-way enablement of the plant," says Steve Borelli, executive director of new products for billing and customer care vendor CSG Systems. For example, cableco OSSs can now track when a digital box goes into the home, the serial number and other information and record information after the service is up and running, such as if a subscriber disconnects, to make sure record-keeping happens down the line, says Borelli.
In addition to veteran cable company suppliers like CSG, several vendors new to the cable market have made a mark for themselves among the cableco set, including Alopa Networks, Emperative Inc. and Sigma Systems Group, now being acquired by Liberate Technologies.
One of the more prominent applications of this technology occurred last year when many cable companies quickly had to transfer customers from the defunct @Home Network to other providers. In one example, Comcast Corp. moved 950,000 subscribers to its in-house ISP operation in a few weeks using the service management system supplied by Sigma Systems, says Ray Celona, senior vice president at Comcast. In Comcast's case, the service management system must interface with subscriber management, billing and element management systems supplied by different vendors. "This is key in building on our ability to smoothly bring our customers new products and services," Celona says.
Following the fall of @Home, several cablecos moved to bring more of their OSS in house, says CSG's Borelli. "If the OSS is core to operating the network -- provisioning cable modems, delivering e-mail, etc. -- they're bringing it more in house," he says. But cable companies still tend to outsource billing and customer care to companies like CSG, which operates and maintains all the software and equipment at the customer site but doesn't pro-vide the personnel for such functions as call centers, Borelli says. Charter Communications Inc.'s July renewal of an outsourced customer care and billing solution from CSG through 2012 is evidence of that fact, says Borelli.
New Services
Some of the provisioning vendors are leveraging their ability to handle the vital task of bringing cable company customers new services to create a market for their own OSS as well as working with other parties' systems.
For example, Susquehanna Communications, a York, Pa.-based cableco, recently contracted with Alopa Networks for a provisioning platform that will be used to qualify, provision, activate and mediate current and next-generation services. It also is deploying Alopa's full OSS suite.
SusCom president and COO James Munchell says the vendor's ability "to quickly tie in and integrate into our existing systems while allowing us to grow into the future with new services that include interactive gaming and voice over IP" was key to the choice of provisioning systems. The package includes a "complete OSS infrastructure that is ready to install today."
Alopa is at the cutting edge of DOCSIS-based software development with a close tie-in with the PacketCable VoIP specifications-development process at Cable Television Laboratories. "This is the software CableLabs is using to test and certify media terminal adaptors under PacketCable," says Ramin Ekhtiar, senior marketing manager at Alopa. "The system automatically takes care of sending information to the call management server, the billing system and the call set-up on the circuit-switched side."
Beyond offering support for automated provisioning and the management of information processes in PacketCable, DOCSIS has the information hooks built into its specifications that could make the way cablecos handle their day-to-day technical operations on a par with any other sector in the telecommunications industry. Given the impact vendor applications of these capabilities might have on cable operators' ability to maximize network capacity and to supply transport services to multiple ISPs, there also are significant revenue advantages latent in the information-generating capabilities of DOCSIS.
Startup Stargus Inc. is another vendor seizing the opportunity to use the operations data flowing from the various components in the DOCSIS network to facilitate a more streamlined operations environment. The Andover, Mass.-based company says its intelligent network management and planning system will allow cable companies to at least double the capacity of the vast majority of high-speed data networks using DOCSIS-based equipment. DOCSIS represents about 70 percent of the installed cable data infrastructure nationwide. The technology also allows operators to move to expanded tiers of service over the version 1.0 DOCSIS system without having to deploy the more expensive version 1.1, say Stargus officials.
The key to the Stargus technology is its ability to extract and analyze performance information generated by millions of devices in a DOCSIS network, says Rafe Leeman, vice president of product marketing at Stargus. "Cable operators want to take the costs out of their operations as they scale to higher penetration levels and to more service options. That's hard to do if you're working with a centralized management system that only can pull information from hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of devices."
Stargus founders, who were part of the DOCSIS design team at CableLabs and sub-sequently served as engineering executives at various cable companies, decided to create the management system themselves when they learned they couldn't put the full potential of the information feeds they'd designed into DOCSIS to use, Leeman says. The information is generated from every DOCSIS modem and other system elements but needs to be filtered carefully, prioritized and collected under a prescribed set of rules if it's to be of any use. Different modem manufacturers employ different approaches to reporting information, which means the Stargus application must identify the type of device in use at any given point in the network and translate that to a normalized database.
"We apply rules to turn the information into useful data, which allows us to generate alerts when there's a need for proactive intervention," Leeman adds. "We employ what we call StarNodes as distributed points of data collection in the network, and these feed the information back to a StarController which makes the data available for Web-based access by the system operations people."
The Stargus CableEdge system makes expert recommendations on what needs to be done to address a particular problem based on how the network is performing compared to system benchmarks. This information also can be used to add capacity to the existing network and to plan cost-effective network upgrades, expansions or new service rollouts, Leeman says.
Acterna is taking an even broader approach to using information generated by network elements for OSS purposes. The company, a leader in network test and measurement systems, is exploiting its understanding of myriad proprietary systems and the DOCSIS platform to help cable companies automate operations. Acterna's new Vision360 OSS is designed to take information from set-top boxes and cable modems to power stations and active field electronics. It combines the data into a coherent alarm monitoring system that can pinpoint and grade the severity of problems across the entire network, says John Hart, vice president for OSS solutions at Acterna. "We can actively tie an occurrence affecting any one customer to the entire route over which that customer's service travels and determine where in that route the problem or problems are located."
The development of the Vision360 system, now undergoing trials with Cablevision Systems and other large cable companies, began with acquisition of a company that had developed the ability to look at information generated by test and measurement equipment from virtually any vendor, Hart says. Acterna used this capability in combination with new software tools that employ standardized interfaces to create the core alarm monitoring system at the heart of Vision360. Now, he says, the company has added capabilities tied to the multiple information-generating capabilities of DOCSIS and various interactive TV systems to provide service-specific oversight tied to quality-of-service and other policy parameters.
"This not only applies to the services end users are getting; it also applies to giving third-party ISPs the ability to assure their service level agreements are being met, which is a revenue-generating opportunity for cable operators," Hart says. "And it gives the operator the tools to keep track of bandwidth usage by those ISPs and their customers."
