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Report: RBOCs Face Triple Play OSS IssuesBy TED GLANZER
TMCnet Communications and Broadband Columnist
With the regulatory winds shifting in their favor, large carriers such as SBC and BellSouth are set to roll-out their respective IPTV solutions, thereby completing the final leg of the vaunted triple play (voice, data and video services over a high-speed network).
Life is good, right? Well, not so fast. According Dittberner Associates research study, "OSS Systems for Triple Play Services," carriers must address operational support system problems such as "service activation, trouble management, and service assurance issues" before triple play appeals to the masses.
According to a Dittberner press release, the report includes the following triple play OSS issues that face carriers:
• Quality of Service and Trouble Management – "IP services layered on top of many network elements and third party supplied components complicated the correlations required to understand QoS or quickly respond to trouble."
• Service Activation – "Deploying sophisticated IP and triple play services require highly flexible and accurate service activation systems that understand the dependencies and subtle nuances of hundreds of versions of network devices."
• Build vs. Buy – "Carriers are still torn over whether to 'build' or 'buy' their OSS capabilities. On this score, Dittberner's report sees the market divided into two camps today: carriers such as Verizon who favor building triple play OSS capabilities in-house and carriers like SBC, who are committed to buying from COTS vendors."
• Interconnect Assurance – "Carriers need to be far more aware of network capacity and quality issues as they expose their infrastructure to other operators as in the case of a third party service provider hosting a game server that requires the incumbent LEC to deliver a high QoS connection to the end user."
"Triple play is set to deploy in a matter of months, but the OSS systems that need to support them are still in R&D mode," Dan Baker, research director of Dittberner's OSS/BSS Knowledgebase, said in a prepared statement. "It's a divide and conquer strategy. No OSS vendor can deliver a complete solution, so the carriers are divvying out portions of the problem to their trusted OSS suppliers. However, considerable synchronization and testing will be needed to glue all those pieces into a system that is sufficiently bulletproof."
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Ted Glanzer is assistant editor for TMCnet. For more articles by Ted Glanzer, please visit:
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