Bridging Legacy, Next-Generation Networks Catalyst, SON, Other Efforts Aim to Span the Divide

By: Paula Bernier

Science fiction movies frequently depict the future as a world populated with shiny new buildings, communications and transportation systems. In reality, the world is, and will be, much more like the one pictured in the cinematic cult classic Blade Runner, in which the old and the new have merged to create exciting, sometimes kludgy, combinations.

That’s the reality because people want to leverage existing investments to whatever extent possible and choose to migrate to new technologies at their own pace. But, given the growing popularity of mobile, IP and Ethernet, and the rise of the App Store, the future is now. As a result, network operators and others in the communications arena are toiling to bridge the gap between legacy and next-generation networks, processes, services and culture.

It’s a tall order, but work is being done in earnest to let the new and the old to work together, all while allowing for faster service creation so those that are inventing what’s next in communications can deliver these experiences over telco networks.

A Catalyst for Change

One interesting development on this front involves two major traditional telecommunications providers, and online retailer and cloud services pioneer Amazon.com, among others.

BT (News - Alert) and Qwest are championing an effort, in which amazon.com is a participant, to create consistent definitions and service catalogs for both traditional telco offerings like voice, video and data connectivity as well as newer Web- and cloud-based services. Also involved in the project are Chinook Hosting, which provides hosted unified communications; Comptel Corp., which sells operational support systems; and Network Cadence, a consulting firm for communications service providers.

The catalog aims to provide functional definitions for all services, denoting how to create and define, fulfill and assure them. These definitions are intended to help both traditional and cloud-based service providers expedite the introduction of new converged services.

The effort is a TeleManagement Forum (News - Alert) initiative. It’s the second phase of the Service Model Catalyst and was on display at the forum’s Management World Americas event Dec. 8 through 10 in Orlando, Fla.

Greg Scullard, CTO office director for Comptel, says this Catalyst program got off the ground in May when the companies joined forces to use the service catalog and the product and service assembly (better known as PSA) architecture the TMF already had compiled as the basis for a larger effort aimed at enabling service providers of all stripes to create mashups combining traditional telco and IT services.

The second phase of the project revolves around creating the necessary definitions, catalogs and framework to enable Qwest (News - Alert) to launch and support cloud-based services from amazon.com and BT paired with hosted services from Chinook, and Qwest’s own offers. With those definitions and catalogs in place, Scullard explains, service providers like Qwest can partner and more easily see what others have to offer on a wholesale basis.

“I kind of like to call it Web services on steroids,” he says.

Having these common underlying definitions also means the provider can more easily support those services throughout their lifecycles – whether those services come from their own networks or via wholesale relationships with other providers.

“A service is a service is a service, whether we’re talking about voice and data or cloud-based, [or services] like hosted Exchange or online storage,” Daniel Vacanti, director of technology at Network Cadence tells INTERNET TELEPHONY.

These services all can be cataloged in the same place and thus can be assured in the same way and fulfilled in the same way, he says, adding that telcos with an understanding of that will be the most likely to survive in the “new world order of telecom.”

The Service-Oriented Network

Another industry effort aimed at enabling telcos to introduce new services in Internet time is under way at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions.

The service-oriented network, or SON, was envisioned as a way to help telcos expose select network capabilities – such as presence and location, identity and voice services, and even operational and billing support systems -- to Web developers, explains Jim McEachern, manager of application enabler standards at Nortel, and a key contributor to the focus group that led to the ATIS (News - Alert) SON effort. That, it is believed, will enable telcos to expedite the delivery of slate of new revenue-generating retail and wholesale services.

“At a high level, the service-oriented network isn’t a new technology, it’s a new business model,” Qwest Communications CTO Pieter Poll tells INTERNET TELEPHONY, “and it’s occurring because of what the telecom industry has done to provide reliable and affordable transport. Cloud business models require partnerships with application and solution providers, and standards and protocols that connect and make interoperable network clouds. The work around the standards and protocols is ongoing, but progress is being made.”

ATIS officially set sail with the SON effort a year ago this month through the creation of the SON Forum. At that time it presented the SON Assessment and Work Plan. Companies involved included Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), AT&T, British Telecom, Cisco, Detecon, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, GENBAND, Hewlett Packard, Huawei, JDSU, Juniper, LG, Motorola, Neustar, Nortel, Qwest, RIM, Sprint, TDS Telecom, Tekelec (News - Alert), UTStarcom and Verizon.

The SON Forum’s next meeting is Feb. 9 through 11 in Texas.

SON builds on the ATIS Convergence (News - Alert) effort, which defined the business requirements around continued telco broadband success. It also leverages the IMS architecture, which decouples the application layer from the network layer, and borrows the concept of reusability from the SOA architecture popular in enterprise networking circles. To the last point, with SON various network resources are exposed so a wide variety of applications and mashups can use and reuse those resources.

But beyond just allowing for network resources to be exposed, the SON initiative aims to help put standards in place on a number of fronts so all this exposure and service creation is simplified from the telco, developer and customer perspectives.

The SON Forum has separated this work into three areas including service delivery creation and enablers; policy and data models; and OSS/BSS and virtualization, explains Andrew White, director of NGN architecture at Qwest.

“These include service enabler characteristics, service catalog, common policy reference model, common data model requirements, reusable OSS components via open API, and network abstraction function and API in the context of virtualization,” says White.

White adds that Qwest is using SON principles in its network today. For example, he says, systems that support the company’s qHome portal, and Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless Integrated Mailbox and One Number Service, are access agnostic and are developed in the Qwest Application Framework.

“The next level of benefit from SON comes from a marketplace of compatible technologies,” White adds. “This is likely two to three years away. The standards need to be published and then integrated into supplier development streams. This next level will provide a ‘plug and play’ capability that helps reduce the integration complexity in the services supply chain.

“The SON work continues to evolve with the goal of making it available to developers as soon as possible,” he continues, noting, “We are sharing our work with other standards organizations such as TM Forum (News - Alert) and Open Mobile Alliance.”

The Telco Answer to the App Store

At the same time telcos are participating in such initiatives as the Catalyst and SON work mentioned above, they also are courting application developers with what many consider a response to Apple (News - Alert)’s App Store.

For example, Verizon Wireless in July announced plans to open what it calls an application storefront through which it works with developers.

Brian Higgins, executive director for ecosystem development within Verizon Wireless and a keynote speaker at last month’s ITEXPO (News - Alert) East in Miami, is responsible for technical support for the developer community within Verizon’s application ecosystem.

While there are some parallels between what Apple has done on these fronts and what Verizon Wireless is doing, the wireless service provider has a very different business model, says Higgins. Both companies, he explains, are providing tools and resources to developers to help them build applications on their devices. However, Verizon Wireless offers a greater diversity of devices and operating systems. And because the company has significant network resources at its disposal, he says, it will expose some of those resources – such as location, messaging, presence, and capabilities linked to quality of service -- through APIs so developers can better differentiate their applications in the marketplace. (While this sounds a lot like the SON idea discussed above, Higgins declined to comment on the potential relationship between the two.)

The diversity of endpoints and operating systems supported by Verizon Wireless will mean the company’s developer partners will have “many large ponds” for their applications, Higgins continues, and will give the carrier more flexibility. On the other hand, he concedes: “It will be trickier for us to get the scale.”

Higgins also offers a reminder that it will take time to develop business models around new devices, applications and partnerships, and to roll out the new LTE (News - Alert) network.

“A lot of the things we’re working on now are more about developing concepts, building the products and communicating out the type of things we’re thinking about, and less about the 20 things we know we’re going to bring to market tomorrow,” he says. “So we’re still in the fairly early stages. Bear in mind that we’re currently targeting to have the initial launch of the [4G LTE] network in the late 2010 timeframe, and that’s just the starting phase.”

The Rise of the Service Broker

When you think about why applications are so quickly developed and introduced on the Internet as opposed to on telco networks, it’s because the former’s infrastructure is a lot easier to work with, notes Patrick Fitzgerald (News - Alert), senior vice president of global sales and marketing at AppTrigger. Meanwhile, with telco networks, you have multiple variants of SS7 and SIP signaling in the mix, he says.

This mish mash of signaling and protocols has given rise to a new class of equipment called the service broker. Fitzgerald notes that this type of product normalizes the network layer to remove complexity and, thus, allows for the more rapid introduction of new services, which may require the interworking of applications with different SIP variants, or create a need for an Ericsson (News - Alert) switch talk to a Siemens switch, as just two examples.

Fitzgerald, with whom INTERNET TELEPHONY spoke in December, said in the past few months there’s been a tremendous amount of activity from telcos relative to service brokers. AT&T issued a service broker request for information in the June/July time frame, he says, and other recent service broker RFIs were issued by Orange as well as VimpleCom of Russia. Meanwhile, Chunghwa Telecom (News - Alert) has issued an RFP on this front, he adds.

Fitzgerald says that’s a clear signal that service providers are starting to recognize the need for service brokers, which they want to help them leverage current assets while allowing them to plug and play new applications once they get next-generation networks in place. Service brokers, he says, can help them span that divide. IT

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