Managing the Challenge: How Ready Are You?

How ready are service providers' provisioning, authentication and integration capabilities for the challenges that come with the proliferation of personalized IP?

The broadband competition is on. Cable operators, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) providers and independent content providers all are vying to offer Internet Protocol (IP) voice, video, and other applications with extensive parental controls and other attractive, increasingly bandwidth-intensive services.

With ownership of the subscriber at stake, most broadband service providers agree that the ability of IP networks to support personalized services (enabling subscribers to tailor applications to their personal needs and desires, promises to generate more loyalty and greater willingness to pay for value) provides the surest path to retaining customers, growing market share and increasing average revenue per user (ARPU). But how ready are these service providers' provisioning, authentication and integration capabilities for the challenges that come with the proliferation of personalized IP?

These nontrivial challenges include managing millions of subscriber and possibly hundreds of service and application profiles: supporting user authentication; service access and mediation transactions at high volumes; managing and ensuring fair allocation of bandwidth and other resources; and, soon, maintaining all this control across emerging converged fixed/wireless service models.

Supporting per-application, per-subscriber and even per-session processes cannot economically be achieved through truck rolls or manual customer service representative intervention. This immense task instead will require automation based on a flexible, extensible subscriber-centric policy management system.

Differentiated Service Opportunity
The emergence of IP as the “convergence layer” for voice, video, and data applications opens a new realm of service differentiation possibilities.

Liberated from managing separate networks to deliver each service, the provider now can use a single network to deliver the video, data, and voice “triple play.” Applications delivered in a common IP format become easier to bundle and provision in differentiated tiers and packages. Providers can define service tiers based on anything that is easily measured and simply controlled, such as monthly consumption, bandwidth, and quality of service (QoS). In sophisticated systems, application-specific tiers are possible, such as tiers with and without VoIP abilities.

Even more compelling, the two-way client/server, on-demand nature of IP networks can enable subscribers to become their own programmer. Through controlled access to content and application servers in the IP network, providers can enable each subscriber to choose his or her unique lineup of content and applications.

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