Scouts Notes: A Report from the Field

With Nimal Gamage, Principal OSS Consultant, Agilent Technologies

As the U.S. mobile industry plods through a period of consolidation, operators worldwide are examining ways to deliver more to their customers through consolidation on a broader stage. As telcos tend to fall behind in new service introduction, mobile and cable operators are sometimes finding themselves to be logical bedfellows in the IP services game. As services race forward, however, QoS is a greater priority and concern. OSSs may not be able to insure service quality if network devices can't provide the means to manage it. Gamage provided insights to Pipeline on these issues as he reported between a series of transatlantic flights.

Cable and Mobile – Logical Bedfellows?
We have seen a few projects come up where cable operators, mainly in Italy, want to offer the same suite of services in a bundle that’s similar to mobile operating companies. Cable’s last mile advantage gives them a leg up in content, which aligns them well with mobile operators. Business alliances affect that landscape though in the United States. In Europe, Vodafone Live for example offers MMS, SMS, voice mail, unified messaging, instant messaging, Java games, WAP and Internet access. This is a very big trend, and the cable companies do not have last mile issues and can indeed compete, just like they do for DSL customer.

If you look at how MMS evolved from a few handsets to where non mobile users can compose MMS messages and send them to mobile devices…what happened is that the origination and termination points for MMS grew from cell phones to desktops to home computers. The cable operators, through interconnection, can make this happen for all the other service bundles.

The way I see this is as follows - the commodity here is the line to your house and the high bandwidth IP connection over it. Voice, video and data all flow over the IP connection. Cell phone operators have capitalized on this kind of model, and the cable operators have now gone to voice, television, video content and Internet. Traditional telcos seem to be lagging though. Activation and trouble shooting seems to be the areas where they lag most often. They must be very aggressive in price and service quality and see how they can deliver the bundle of 'do-alls' to keep their clients.

Telco Challenges
Telcos are good at activating the traditional voice lines. The more special the service type, the worse they get. Voice –> ISDN -> XDSL seems to be the order of competency. Try a voice line and at the same time an XDSL line, the activation time will vary by a fair amount. Within XDSL you can be sure to not get the tier or special feature unless you are after it (like a fixed IP or IP range). The cable operators entering the VoIP market seem to be very aggressive in training techs to get it right (for their specialty services).

Mobility and presence
With wireless carriers what we see is in terms of presence is mainly least cost algorithm work. Users have a small daemon on their laptop that detects the availability of multiple IP service providers, by which I mean GPRS, UMTS, WIFI, or some other bearer. The daemon will use a least cost route to send the IP traffic. All applications on the desktop are agnostic to the changes to the bearer and will work along fine. This won’t require any new applications except for the worker bee application, which is the daemon. IM tools also keep working under this model. All of the major wireless operating companies who offer multiple bearers are looking at this.

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