With IPTV initiatives and rollouts under way, the race to deliver interactive, personalized entertainment and content to millions of households has begun. On one side are wireline telecom operators, which are building high-capacity networks driving bandwidth into the last mile, and learning the skills of sourcing and delivering content and programming. On the other side are the cablecos, defending their turf with triple play and, until very recently, beating xDSL with their cheaper cable modem service.
While IPTV tantalizes all leading Tier 1 incumbent converged service providers (CSPs) with visions of reduced customer churn and increased revenue, it is important that CSPs choose the right IPTV deployment strategy so that they don’t lose their way in this race to offer new, converged services.
The reason for this concern is that while the focus has been on infrastructure hardware, IT/OSS challenges have not been addressed to their full extent. Most CSPs think about the OSS implications of IPTV long after the network architecture has been defined, network and device vendors have been selected, trials and tests have been completed, and network deployment has been initiated.
This practice of OSS as an afterthought is not new. In the past, absence of early planning and investments in provisioning and assurance delayed the scaling of IP VPN and VoIP businesses. It impacted delivery of QoS and prevented CSPs from offering differentiated services.
As IPTV deployments undergo tests and trials, they face imminent challenges in the following key areas of OSS:
- Transforming the service layer, including cost-effectively managing the evolution from legacy to next-generation OSS
- Creating a flexible and scalable provisioning process that makes the network transparent
- Understanding and managing the service experience
Transforming the Service Layer
Most CSPs will attempt to use a large part of the existing OSS to deploy, provision and manage IPTV. The case for using legacy OSS has been made many times before: familiarity with the system, adequate functionality, no additional training costs and the availability of skilled staff, hinders risk-taking with new systems.
It may be possible to keep going with legacy systems for trials or over the short term. As IPTV deployments start scaling, the shortcoming and inadequacies of legacy OSS become obvious. Most current OSSs are stove-piped, preventing close coordination and synchronization between the customer, service and the network layers. They are not optimized to create an agile OSS infrastructure capable of new service creation and delivery.
Unfortunately, CSPs do not have the luxury of time or resources to deploy next-generation, IP-optimized OSSs in one fell swoop. Most will evolve their OSSs adding new components and retiring old systems. This can be done effectively and with the least amount of disruption using some of the following best practices that we have observed with a number of our customers:
By selecting vendor solutions that enable cross-domain data sourcing and correlation and abstraction of functionality, CSPs allow for interoperability of existing systems and gradual decommissioning of legacy systems without major disruptions
Most existing OSSs aren’t optimized for fast service creation, bundling and deployment. In the next several years, a majority of next-generation services are going to be created and orchestrated using IMS and service delivery platforms (SDP). Selecting vendor solutions that have optimized their OSS for IMS/SDP support and deployment will make new services rollout much more efficient.
It is surprising that most OSS vendor solutions are not architected with three key requirements: scalability (J2EE, relational databases, n-tier); interoperability (including standards such as OSS-J, data model configurable); and future-proof (flexible data models, automated business rules, process flow automation). By applying these three basic criteria, CSPs can ensure the investment they are making in OSSs today will not hold them back from scaling and interoperating services.
Creating Flexible, Scalable Provisioning
For too long the fulfillment process (order management, service and resource inventory, and service activation) has been designed with the network technology in mind. The fulfillment process has to evolve now to accommodate bundling of a number of diverse network technologies over which a wide range of services can be delivered.
For this to happen, the service layer has to become the pivot around which the network and customer layers can be optimized. The resource/network availability and functionality has to be abstracted, enabling faster service creation. Similarly, the product catalog at the customer layer must map to the service catalog and transparent order management to allow marketing and product managers to define service bundles without being IT and OSS experts.
The process of validating an order, performing service qualification, and automated design and build from Layers 1 through 6 can only be done if the service layer is empowered with the right OSS.
Understanding the Service Experience
If the service experience for a paying customer cannot be monitored and managed, no amount of new services will drive revenue or growth. In fact, the lack of such a capability will increase churn and reduce customer satisfaction. Understanding the service experience requires a deep knowledge of what resources are allocated to deliver which services to a paying customer. In the world of IPTV, these resources could be anything – a physical, logical or IT element in Layers 1 through 6. The service experience can be monitored only by understanding the performance of these resources and correlating them to the service heuristics.
It will require CSPs to move to a service operations center from a network operations center by making significant investments in service management.
IPTV holds the promise to revolutionize how consumers entertain and educate themselves. This will not be possible unless CSPs carry out a corresponding revolution in their back-office systems. In the final analysis, a customer’s experience of the CSPs’ network will only be as good as that CSP’s OSS.
Sanjay Mewada is vice president of strategy at NetCracker Technology Corp. He can be reached at sanjay.mewada@netcracker.com.
NetCracker Technology Corp. www.netcracker.com
