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By Kevin Macaluso & Mehdi Sif
Supporting "Any Mode of Operation" for Triple Play Service Delivery
IPTV: The Change Agent
Video is the “change agent” that has triggered a cycle of upgrades in networks across the world. Service providers have made strategic business and network transformation decisions that will allow them to become fully engaged in the IP television (IPTV) and triple play businesses.
To benefit from triple play opportunities, operators must ensure that their networks can accommodate new demands for dynamic, content-rich applications and bandwidth-intensive services over the next five to ten years. As a result, distributed, end-to-end service delivery architectures, as offered by the leading triple play equipment vendors, have become a de facto blueprint for service providers and vendors alike for enabling and accelerating triple play network transformations in large-scale IPTV rollouts around the world.
Over the past 18 months, leading triple play solutions vendors and their service provider partners have pioneered numerous IPTV service rollouts, and developed unique operational IPTV expertise by working very closely in the IPTV “trenches”. This unique expertise has enabled key vendors to augment and solidify their architecture blueprint for triple play service delivery to cater to a multitude of network and deployment environments with different deployment criteria and operational characteristics:
- Legacy infrastructure and network assets: Integrate and consolidate different legacy network elements and operational environments, present mode of operations — geographic coverage, density, available infrastructure
- Region- or geography-specific characteristics: IPTV legislation, competitive landscape, time-to-market pressures, etc.
- Strategic options: IPTV as tactical, incremental service over HSI versus more strategic investment, business model and infrastructure transformation (i.e., service provider positioned at the center of the value chain, as opposed to being network operators or bandwidth reseller)
- Customer base: Service take rate, broadband penetration, deployment size, price elasticity of demand, availability of content
- Other factors: Penetration of “plug-and-play” appliances in households (e.g. set-top boxes [STBs], PCs, voice over IP [VoIP] phones) and more
This document reviews some key findings in the industry and provides significant empirical data relating to the specifics of IPTV network rollouts and associated modes of operation across more than 40+ of the largest IPTV service deployments worldwide, exemplifying how operators can rollout a new generation of infrastructures that can optimize triple play service delivery for “any mode of operation” — i.e. for any combination of access technology, home gateway, authentication protocol, and connectivity mode, as well as subscriber management, policy enforcement and content insertion choices.
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"...operators found themselves losing up to 15% of their revenues as a result of these loopholes." |
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Combining Access Technologies to extend Service Reach, optimize delivery
The success of triple play and rich media services depends on the service providers’ ability to provide a dramatically enhanced user experience and more interactivity than the traditional broadcast video network offerings. Service providers must indeed deliver user-centric broadband services — that is, any content, to any user at any time, in the most efficient and cost-effective way. This need for flexibility and delivery of services to the most economical point dictates that operators must use a variety of access types and technologies to reach all subscribers cost-effectively, over both fixed and mobile access methods.
For service providers, this typically means results in a mix of access technologies including CO-based DSL (multi-ADSL); fiber to the node (FTTN) (i.e., ADSL2plus), very high-speed DSL (VDSL) and VDSL2; fiber to the user (FTTU) based on a passive optical network; 3G mobile; wireless fidelity (WiFi); and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX). The key challenge for operators when they introduce these technologies is to minimize the operational impact by maintaining a unified mode of operation across all access networks. Ideally, therefore, access nodes should share the same equipment practice, typically run the same software, and present unified interfaces, and modes of operations toward the aggregation network. In this way, operators can rationalize their networks and simplify their operations in the aggregation and edge networks. This is achieved through a new generation of service delivery infrastructures that can leverage the full breadth of access portfolio and methods (xDSL, FTTx, wireless etc.) enabling the ultimate flexibility in the first mile.
Home Gateway Deployment Models
There are vast disparities across regions for home gateway choices, with no predominant mode of operation across service providers globally. In North America, service providers favor a routed home gateway mode of operation and because of the larger average number of home appliances per household (STBs, VoIP phones, etc.), routed gateways are typically used to simplify subscriber and host/appliance management challenges.
In Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, on the other hand, the use of bridged home gateways represents the predominant mode of operation, where continuity from the HSI mode of operation seems to be the preferred approach.
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