VoIP Fuels OSS, but Will Regulators Crash the Party? (cont'd)

Assurance Solutions Need to Catch Up
This is not only a weakness of the service, but reflects the fact that mature service assurance OSSs for VoIP are still six months to a year away. "There are some technologies that require you to put software on a user's computer, but that's too intrusive and not meant to be used at every end point," says Sharief Elgamal, OSS design engineer in Comcast's OSS planning and design group. "It's just for testing network quality, so it doesn't diagnose on a per subscriber basis," he explains. Similarly, says Elgamal, edge-based applications are used for testing, but don't reach individual end points. There are also passive monitors, network probes that "sniff" packets for network information, but these tend to deliver too much data and not enough information.

In fairness to service assurance vendors, VoIP is very new, and operators like Comcast are driving the requirements that will result in product maturation from companies like Concord, Brix and Xacct. Agilent, for example, announced its new VoIP QoS management solution for enterprises and managed service offerings. While this technology is in trials at several major carriers, it is not yet in production. It is, however, designed to measure and enforce VoIP SLAs for traffic volume, service availability and voice quality. This third measurement is the real trick, however, because in the end service quality is all about what the customer actually experiences.

Fulfillment Solutions are Further Ahead
The market for VoIP OSSs on the fulfillment side is a bit more mature. "This side of the picture isn't bad," says Comcast's Elgamal. "We're putting in a new provisioning system (from COTS products) that will handle all of our services together." Fulfillment solutions benefit from broadband requirements developed during the past several years. For example, Syndesis has already deployed capabilities for service providers that allow for dynamic, variable bandwidth allocation - an anticipated capability in the OSS space. "Users can come through a portal into our software and crank up the bandwidth when they need it, and then turn it back down," says Nicholson.

The key to this kind of capability is having a platform that sees beyond the IP layer and can interact with and manage QoS at multiple layers. "We're doing end-to-end IP over layer 2 technologies running over layer 1.5 technologies like gigabit Ethernet and PNNI. You have to have all of those layers in the platform and know how to map the QoS from layer to layer," he says. What Nicholson is talking about is having a view of the network's complete topology from end to end and top to bottom. Having this kind of information and the ability to affect changes to the network on the fly is critical to delivering managed, personalized IP services - including business quality VoIP.

This is good news for VoIP, because it should mean that when demand for VoIP explodes, the infrastructure may be ready to deliver it - thus avoiding the kind of fulfillment problems DSL continues to suffer. This also, however, assumes that VoIP providers choose to use the solutions available to them. "There's an astounding majority who are rolling their own provisioning systems…which is unbelievably short sighted because it's not going to scale, survive, be reliable, and it will make for miserable service," says Atreus' Hurrell. When providers choose to build their own platforms, it is often a sign of hesitancy to make a committed investment in a new technology.

Judge For Yourself
The only way for any provider - ILEC, IXC, CLEC or cable MSO - to truly judge the suitability of any OSS product for its own environment is to test it, trial it, and/or put it through its paces in a defined proof of concept project. More and more often, vendors and service providers alike are turning away from endless PowerPoint presentations and moving directly to lab trials and POCs. While the issue of who pays for such trials is always at hand, the end result will undoubtedly save money. Ultimately, service providers are burned and waste money when they sign large contracts only to discover their chosen vendor - often chosen for a cheaper price - either cannot deliver its technology, or isn't quite suitable for the unique environment. The cost of a trial should be shared between vendors and service providers. In the end, this insures that everyone has something at stake. It also insures that guilty vaporware vendors - those that sour the OSS business for the good guys - have no chance of perpetuating their bad business practices and making the whole industry pay.

A Final Word and Warning on VoIP
VoIP is already happening on a global scale, so there's no question that service providers and OSS vendors alike need to invest in this technology in a committed way. Committed investments should also help regulators to see that their interference in the market will only cause the United States to fall further behind the rest of the world in broadband applications development. The onus is on members of the CLEC, cable and OSS communities, however, not only to conduct their businesses in an honorable manner, but to voice their needs to Congress, the FCC and to state PUCs. It would be easy to stand by and allow special interest lobbyists to spoil the party for everyone but ILEC CxOs and their minions. If VoIP is the first step for the future of ubiquitous communications, then now is the time to make sure that future is secure.

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