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Subscriber and Service Connectivity Modes
In North America, service providers have a strong preference for a VLAN-per-subscriber connectivity model, possibly to mimic modes of operations that were used for previous ATM-based VPI/VCI connectivity models, which are the norm for HSI deployments.
In Europe, Latin America and the Middle East on the other hand, service providers have adopted the VLAN-per-service model as the predominant mode of operation. Other service providers across the globe have adopted deployment models such as VLAN per service, per subscriber or VLAN per IP DSLAM. These cases point to the need to support any combination of connectivity modes within the same service delivery framework.
Service delivery platforms must provide the comprehensive set of subscriber management and policy enforcement capabilities that allow service providers to deploy optimized triple play services over any combination of broadband service access node (BSAN) to broadband service aggregator (BSA) connectivity modes across the second and third miles.
1. The vast majority of cable deployments and managed communication services from telcos leverage DHCP almost exclusively.
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"...these architectures need to be highly flexible, service-rich, and dependable resource pools, allowing service providers to engage in rapid innovation and deployment without requiring the complete re-design of their services or the installation of new equipment." |
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channel. This approach contrasts with optimized service delivery implementation, which intelligently replicates and forwards content (through multicasting functions) to the access or aggregation network, depending on actual traffic patterns and channel audience, to achieve minimum-cost video distribution.
Likewise, for VoD or advertising content insertion for BTV channels, actual economics, demographics and traffic/viewing patterns will determine the most optimal and cost-effective content insertion point. For example, specific demographics, age groups and ethnicity in a given region may dictate that the most economic point for inserting foreign language soap operas would be within the central office. Other content may be seldom viewed in a given region, but still viewed broadly (by millions of subscribers) across all regions, so would justify insertion at a more centralized location in the third or fourth mile.
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Optimized Policy Enforcement and Content Insertion
Operators are working on new service delivery architectures that will be the foundations for their service rollouts for a variety of IPTV and other triple play services over the next five to ten years. Therefore, these architectures need to be highly flexible, service-rich, and dependable resource pools, allowing service providers to engage in rapid innovation and deployment without requiring the complete re-design of their services or the installation of new equipment.
This new generation of service delivery infrastructures implements the optimal distribution of service intelligence over the entire access, aggregation and edge network, rather than concentrating the policy enforcement point at arbitrarily defined single policy enforcement points, as was the case for fairly static, low-bandwidth HSI deployments. A more flexible and optimized deployment of services in a network guarantees high quality and reliable delivery of all services to the user.
For example, multicasting from a centralized point in the network (subscriber termination point) would result in the situation where every packet for every channel being watched would be sent as a separate unicast stream to each subscriber across the network, even if thousands of customers on the same digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM) were watching the same
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Building triple play service deliveries based on legacy HSI network limitations (i.e., fixed, arbitrarily defined policy enforcement points on legacy BRAS) can lead to exponential cost structures and significantly higher risk of restriction as service offerings and behaviors evolve over time.
By design, service delivery architectures must enable the required distribution of service intelligence and policy enforcement of functionalities that were typically centralized in the BRAS for HSI. These functionalities are migrated and augmented to address the stringent QoS, security, accounting, authentication, scalability and service availability demands of triple play rollouts.
In conclusion, dealing with different deployments around the world, it’s clear that triple play service delivery architectures must cater to any mode of operation without fundamentally impacting the architectural principles itself. Ultimate flexibility must be enabled for content insertion, policy enforcement, and service intelligence across the infrastructure, allowing service providers to continuously optimize their infrastructure based on actual and evolving traffic patterns. Service delivery architectures must be elastic and enable right-sized deployments that can grow cost-effectively to support mass-market IPTV service rollouts.
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