BROADBAND: The New Challenges

The battle for the living room is on. Companies from the disparate worlds of
cable, media and software manufacturing, are scrambling to piece together a
broadband jigsaw puzzle. One whose pieces consist of the key assets, that will
eventually position them for leadership in the world, promised by fast Internet
connections. As consumers demand for low-cost, high-speed access to
content-heavy, bandwidth-intensive data, video and voice services over the
Internet, intensify the battle for ‘living-room dominance’ for subscriber
share.

They are grabbing for parts of the basic infrastructure. Cable systems,
satellite partnerships as well as the packaged content that will come into high
demand, once the ‘fat’ pipelines are in place to deliver bigger and richer
data files, and media types, over the net.

IDC projects the number of broadband subscribers in India to be near half a
million, by 2004. With such a huge wave of growth potential looming ahead,
network equipment vendors are scrambling to bring a new generation of broadband
access solutions to the market, for their service provider’s customers. These
new systems can support multiple high-speed data, voice, and streaming video IP
services, not just over one access media but over any media.

Changing Business Models

Flat rate is unsustainable

Imagine if your utility bills were the same, month after
month, whether you used very little water or electricity every day, or you ran
your water and your air conditioner at a full blast, 24 hours a day. You are
entitled to consume as much or as little as you wish, anytime you want it.
Chances are that you would not accept such a service agreement. Not only because
it is not a fair arrangement, but also because such wasteful consumption would
put pressure on the finite supply of water and electricity. The result would be
that most of your normal demands for usage would most likely, go unfulfilled.

As high speed, broadband access deployment moves to the next
stage, intense competition has created the need for all service providers to
redefine business models and objectives. Serious considerations must be made to
abandon certain old habits and practices left over from the early Internet
frenzy days, most notably, the ‘flat rate’ fee structure. No service
provider can hope to stay in business for long by continuing to offer a single,
egalitarian ‘flat rate’ access service to all subscribers, regardless of
actual usage.

The new paradigm for delivering IP-based services is also
forcing the service providers to adopt newer business models. The retention of
customers will require that a service provider offers different class of service
options and associated tariffs, while guaranteeing the quality of subscribed
services. ‘Back Office’ usage-based accounting and subscriber billing,
becomes an important competitive differentiation in the new era of convergent IP
services over the broadband networks from cable and wireless to DSL networks.

The value-added paradigm

A live and typical broadband example is that of Singapore
Telecommunications (SingTel), a premier provider of domestic, international and
mobile telecommunications as well as postal services. It aims to be the first
truly pan-Asian total communications carrier, with a reach unmatched by any
other operator in Asia-Pacific. SingTel has deployed a IP service management
solutions package, ERX-1400, to offer additional value-added capabilities to its
customers, such as the recently announced iTV service.

iTV is a new and an unique service combining broadcast and
interactive TV programming, Internet access, e-mail, and multimedia shopping
through a single intuitive interface. Users of the iTV service, now gain control
of the TV programming content reaching their home by scheduling it at a time
suitable for their lifestyle. The SingTel iTV service, delivered through its
broadband Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) infrastructure, offers
SingTel customers high-speed connectivity with interactive digital video
capabilities and Internet access. The system ERX-1400 is designed to deliver
hundreds of simultaneous multicast 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps video streams to SingTel
subscribers, without impacting the DSL service to its DSL customers.

The initial service offerings available during the trial
period are video-on-demand, scheduled program channels, electronic program
guide, television commerce/home shopping and information services, etc.
Additional services, such as enhanced TV, interactive gaming and interactive
advertising, will be made available at a later stage.

Faced with an increased competition and price pressure for
traditional transport services, service providers have turned to value-added
services to create incremental revenue and increase customer loyalty. By adding
value-added IP services to their service portfolio, service providers are able
to enhance their attractiveness and move up the value-chain with their
customers.

The Broader Issues

Broadband technologies give service providers the opportunity
to offer more than one type of high-speed access. However, it also poses
associated technical and economic challenges, since each broadband technology
uses different network equipment over different access media:

• Digital subscriber line access multiplexer over plain old
  telephone wires

• Cable modem and cable modem termination system over
  two-way transmission hybrid fiber or co-axial cable

• Wireless head-end equipment over wireless airwaves

• The most cost effective–Ethernet on RJ45 carried
  through UTP and fiber

A service provider interested in offering multiple services
over multiple access media, must purchase different types of equipment and
deploy multiple networks for each of these services. This is extremely costly
and not to mention, presents a huge operational and management challenge.

Manual is on the way out

Much of the growing demand for broadband access is going to
come from individual consumers, a service provider with a manual subscriber
provisioning, and management system, will quickly find his operation going out
of control. A manual provisioning environment is extremely
administration-demanding, time-intensive and costly. Imagine a cable operator
having to involve a customer service representative, often spending several
hours, each time to activate service for each subscriber!

Need for neat aggregation

One of the major attractions of broadband technologies is
that they offer a large Internet access pipe that enables transmission of a huge
amount of information. Cable and fixed-point wireless technologies have two
important characteristics in common–both are ‘fat’ pipes that are ‘fixed’.
In that, they are not readily expandable and designed to be shared by many
subscribers. DSL, on the other hand, allocates a dedicated line to each
subscriber. However, at its aggregation point, bandwidth also becomes ‘shared’.
In other words, while the bandwidth pipe for all the three technologies is ‘broad’,
it is ‘shared’ at some point, and the total bandwidth is finite. Therefore,
utilization and prioritization of the usage of this ‘pipe’ necessitates
efficient management.

Seamless integration, absolutely essential

A long-standing business axiom states that accountability
exists only with the right measurements, and that business prospers only with
the proper management information. An effective end-to-end broadband service
management system must meet four major requirements:

• Automatic and dynamic subscriber provisioning The
  first requirement is to integrate service subscription orders and changes,
  automatically and dynamically, with the various processes that invoke
  provisioning and delivery of requested or on-demand services

• Guaranteed class and QoS The second requirement is
  to offer different class of services with a varying fee, and guarantee the
  quality of service level associated with each service class

• Data collection, warehousing and usage billing The
  third requirement is to capture a subscriber’s actual usage, calculating
  the bill based on the rate associated with the customer’s subscribed
  service levels

• Multiple service, multi-access media The fourth
  requirement is to enable the subscriber to dynamically order any service. It
  may be based on the time of the day or week, or premier services that
  support merged data, voice and video over any access broadband media. The
  idea is to integrate them into a single point of contact for the subscriber.

Feature Rich and Scalable

To accelerate the development cycle for network equipment
suppliers, IP service management solutions providers, have developed
state-of-the-art standards, compliant broadband access, enabling platforms that
support multiple services over any media. These are adaptive software platform,
specifically designed for network equipment vendors for rapid adaptation to
their new broadband access systems.

Service providers looking for a feature-rich IP services
platform, need to consider the merits of these solutions. The platform enables
an array of service-provisioning capabilities and supports some of the highest
in-service (i.e. live network deployments) concurrent subscriber sessions,
utilizing MPLS and wire-speed throughput, enabling IP QoS and multicast
capabilities.

Tremendous growth in the demand for high-speed private line
services has created a need for high-capacity service provider edge devices. The
new family of edge-routing switches is capable of aggregating thousands of
customer leased lines in a single chassis, and forwarding this traffic on
high-speed links to the Internet backbone. It also supports high-touch services,
like IP QoS and VPN, while maintaining wire-speed performance on all customer
connections.

Functionality bridges operational gaps

Broadband solutions are scalable and highly-adaptive
architectural software platforms, designed to be easily incorporated into any
network system, including cable modem systems, wireless head-end equipment and
DSL Access Multiplexers (DSLAMs). It provides a set of comprehensive software
functional components in a "near turnkey" package, bridging the
operational gaps between the network access concentration layer and IP service
layer.

Other Key Features

• Provides rapid adaptation to any existing or new
  broadband access network systems, thereby ensuring fast time to market

• Supports multiple front-end access services seamlessly
  with back office functions around a robust usage data warehouse for data
  collection, usage-based billing and trends analysis

• Automatic subscriber initialization and self-provisioning–a
  process by which a subscriber gains access to the services offered by a
  service provider, with minimum manual configuration by the operator

• Extensive QoS that specifies and guarantees upstream and
  downstream access bandwidth allocation, to arbitrate between traffic flows
  competing for resources and to protect higher priority services from
  resource depletion caused by lower priority services

• Ensures maximum interoperability by adhering and adopting
  industry standards wherever appropriate

• Supports multiple broadband media on the same
  architecture, enabling developers to incorporate one or more access media
  provisioning modules.

Shirish Kanitkar, CEO, Unisphere Networks India