Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Promises

Making Your N-Play Power Play -
Fulfillment Automation Strategies for the Move
Beyond Double-, Triple-, and Quad-Play

By Mark Nicholson and Adam Boone

Imagine that we live in a bizarre alternate reality world where there is only one kind of motor vehicle: the pickup truck.

The only family car you would own would be a pickup truck. When you drove the family around someone might have to sit in the bed of the truck. You would commute every day in a pickup truck, through traffic snarls of other pickup trucks.

All goods would be transported, even over long distances, by pickup trucks. There would be no taxis, buses or trains … only pickup trucks with people crammed into the truck beds.

Police, fire, and paramedic first responders would race to the scenes of crimes and accidents in pickup trucks.

And speaking of racing, the Indy 500, Monaco Grand Prix, and other famous races would all feature pickup trucks striving to outrun one another.

It would be a strange and silly world, wouldn’t it?

Yet, this alternate reality mirrors the current state of telecom services in many ways as our industry moves toward content-based services.

Specifically, when we try to move different types of content to subscribers over connections that are not optimized for that type of content, we are effectively using a “one size fits all” approach to service delivery. That’s about like forcing everyone in the world to drive pickup trucks … There is only a subset of cases in which it is the optimal solution.

The Move to N-Play Services

A battle is under way for “share of wallet.” For example, telcos who chose to offer IPTV services and video-on-demand are not competing with only the cable companies; They also are competing against the local DVD rental store.

As telecom grows increasingly competitive, operators are leveraging their converged infrastructure to offer double-play, triple-play, quad-play … up to N-Play services. This march into the multi-play world means that telcos now must recognize that a service is not simply connectivity like it once was. Instead, services comprise both the connectivity and the content that is ultimately destined for consumption by the subscriber.

Content-based services effectively demand application-driven Quality of Service. That is, the application being used to deliver content to the end subscriber – IPTV, VoIP, Gaming, Hosted Apps, etc. – should dictate the QoS and other parameters of the connectivity that

Imagine that we live in a bizarre alternate reality world where there is only one kind of motor vehicle: the pickup truck.

is used to carry that content. This is especially true in services such as television, where a relatively high standard of quality that subscribers are accustomed to and will demand. If an IPTV service cannot meet that standard, then subscribers will churn away to competitors.

Some people argue that the connectivity requirements for content can be solved by massive overbuilding of capacity, essentially throwing tons of bandwidth at the problem. While that might seem plausible, it does not really solve the problem, for a number of reasons:

Capacity planning is often a challenging task, and keeping far enough ahead of the curve to permit massive “safety stock” of capacity to cover anticipated traffic is even more difficult. This is especially true of new services that have unknown or estimated take rates.
Contention and traffic bottlenecks crop up, especially in access portions of the network, and the time it takes to respond and solve a given bottleneck probably is more time than a subscriber is willing to wait before calling your competitor.
Power users are unpredictable and may become bandwidth hogs at times you do not anticipate, further worsening the potential for traffic contention in access portions of the network.
Massive overbuilding is extraordinarily expensive. And even if you establish a large cushion of extra capacity, there is no telling whether that capacity will be sufficient for tomorrow’s applications. Our networked life styles have evolved from voice, email, and simple web surfing – which used a relative trickle of capacity – to bandwidth hungry applications like gaming, and music downloads, video conferencing, and television.

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