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Americas Issue: Mid-February 2005
Provisioning to Win: Next-Gen IP Services
Help comes from self-managing products and services.
by Sanjay Castelino
To profit from the opportunities presented by next-gen IP services, providers will need to provision and manage these services more effectively on an unprecedented scale across much more complex CPE. The trend toward self-managing products and services can help.
The intense focus on rolling out next-gen IP services is shaping one of the biggest changes in the telecom industry in decades. This change brings with it unique opportunities and challenges, as providers are faced with extending their managed network infrastructures deep into customers’ premises to deliver advanced video, voice and home networking services reliably and profitably.
Turning up these new services will depend on providers’ abilities to provision and manage effectively advanced CPE such as RGWs (residential gateways), which are fast becoming the standard technology for delivering next-gen services to consumers and businesses. According to In-Stat/MDR, RGWs will increase from 3 percent of the roughly $5.1 billion CPE market in 2003 to one-third of all devices shipped in 2007.
Since RGWs are central to the delivery of new digital services, providers recognize that they must extend for the first time the boundaries of their management operations beyond the CO to directly manage these devices in the home. Extending the management domain for providers represents a significant shift in the industry and a new hurdle providers must overcome to deliver the next generation of digital services. In addition, to scale new services to the mass market successfully, providers will need to utilize equipment from multiple vendors to encourage price competition and take advantage of unique functionality in different devices. This further complicates the customer experience and introduces a new set of operational complexities and costs.
This extended domain of responsibility can be called the new network, where efficient provisioning processes and the ability to deliver a superior customer experience will be critical success factors. Unlike the rollout of high-speed Internet services (where dial-up was the only alternative), there are established and simple alternatives to VoIP and IP TV. The cost of doing a poor job and delivering a sub-par customer experience means incumbent providers of voice and video services will retain their customers, locking out other providers from the new revenue opportunities essential to their future success. Management of the new network is a product imperative, with poor execution resulting in slow adoption rates and exorbitant rollout costs.
Overcoming Provisioning Challenges
The new network requires intelligent, automated provisioning processes that need little to no intervention from non-technical users to ensure delivery of complex digital services. Key areas where this will be most important are:
• Multivendor relationships. Most providers are partnering with multiple device vendors to deliver unique digital services over a diverse range of set-top boxes, home networking hubs or VoIP hardware. This range of choices gives providers greater economic flexibility and more opportunities to differentiate their services competitively based on CPE innovation. Provisioning processes must be able to adapt rapidly to new devices to help providers streamline the configuration and ongoing support of new services across multiple CPE platforms.
• Multi-application implementations. Digital services require a diverse range of complex applications to deliver highly customized, on-demand offerings to consumers. Enabling the operational organizations such as customer care and network operations to understand the workings and interactions of these various applications is a slow process, often taking months of on-the-job learning. To accelerate deployment of new services, providers must bridge the gap between product organizations that understand how new services are designed to operate and operational organizations that must make the services work in the field.
• Multimodal support. In deploying basic broadband services, most providers developed multichannel management strategies that enabled them to handle questions over the telephone or via the Internet. To provision and support next-gen IP services cost effectively, providers will need to evolve multichannel strategies into multimodal strategies: the ability to take questions from customers via their preferred channels but to resolve those questions using the provider’s preferred (i.e., most efficient) channel.
For example, an IP TV service customer is more likely to request help over the telephone than to visit a Web site. However, a provider may want to solve the problem automatically and remotely via the Internet, rather than walk the customer through time consuming, manual steps to troubleshoot his set-top box.
All of this must be accomplished while shielding consumers from the technical complexity of new services. Mass-market consumers looking for a new provider of telephone or TV services will not tolerate difficult setup and management processes. The provider must manage the experience tightly for each service and across services—fulfilling the real promise to consumers of the triple play.
Managing On the Edge
To handle the requirements of the new network, providers will need to move management processes closer to the network edge, where service-critical devices reside.
Built-in management is a new approach that builds intelligence and automation directly into broadband services, so they can install, diagnose and repair themselves or tell users and support personnel how to use and maintain them. This unique approach leverages industry standards such as UPnP and the DSL Forum’s TR-69 protocol, which abstract device configuration and status information so management software can resolve problems or make changes more easily. This allows next-gen services to become much more self-managing, making them more convenient for subscribers to use and more cost effective for providers to deliver.
With more intelligence built into broadband services, customers will be able to self-provision service requests on the fly: for example, activating a new VoIP line by clicking a button or a new IP TV service by contacting an automated service agent that determines remotely what configuration changes are necessary and executes those changes automatically. These services will be intelligent enough to collect the right information, perform functions independently, and communicate with back-end systems as necessary, across a wide variety of devices.
Self-managing products and services have already had an impact on the telecom industry. In the early days, many broadband providers discove-red they could not add subscribers fast enough to meet the ROI goals of their infrastructure investments: Provisioning and supporting high-speed data services involved too many man hours and truck rolls. In response, providers such as BellSouth, Bell Canada, BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTL, SBC and Verizon used automation technology to make their data services smarter and able to replace many manual tasks associated with configuration and problem management. Eventually, these providers made this process a competitive differentiator.
As they begin to roll out next-gen IP services, these and other visionary providers are applying self-managing technologies to gain a similar competitive edge. For example, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Com unit, Europe’s largest DSL provider, is applying a built-in management approach to its next-gen residential and small business services, including consumer DSL, small business DSL, security applications, VoIP, and wired or wireless networking.
BT, Europe’s second-largest telecom provider, is saving an estimated $1 million per month in deflected calls by making its basic broadband services more self-managing. The company was also able to launch a new, lower-priced tier of DSL service through aggressive use of self-service. Now BT is taking a built-in management approach to help deliver on its brand promise of a customer experience that’s “simple and complete”—particularly as it rolls out next-gen consumer and business services over IP.
“Building management into our services is going to be an ongoing process,” says Mike Galvin, director of Internet operations for BT Retail. “Customers are going to expect more from it and less interaction with it. As we move away from Windows-based machines and toward appliances, automation will become increasingly important.”
The new network definitely poses new challenges. By using a built-in management approach that incorporates CPE in provisioning and support processes, providers can make their next-gen IP services more self-managing, converting significant challenges into strategic business opportunities and more loyal customers.
Sanjay Castelino is vice president of industry marketing for Motive, Inc. (scastelino@motive.com)
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