http://www.phoneplusmag.com/toc631.html
Posted: 03/2006 IP Changes Rules of Interconnect Game By Tara Seals SINCE INTERCONNECTION accounts for a large portion of expenses and revenue for traditional wholesale carriers, the game of keeping these systems up-to-date and reducing complexity is well-known and played often. But as voice margins decline, operators are looking to deploy IP data services, like interactive gaming, music and videos, making for more dynamic and complex partner relationships, and a diverse back office. For traditional wireline voice providers, this shifting playing field can mean: Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. To make sure they end up on Boardwalk and Park Place instead of the low-rent district, carriers can plan for the new requirements and obstacles that rolling out new services will mean for their interconnect business. Among these challenges are integrating systems for centralized data management, ensuring resource allocation for bandwidth-intensive services, implementing new billing procedures, enabling end-to-end visibility in partnerships and keeping an eye on revenue assurance. With wholesale voice in decline, this has led to competition, pressure and traffic growth along with razor-sharp margins. Thus, taking advantage of rate changes, trading minutes effectively and managing partnerships to take the cost out are the top priorities as it concerns legacy services. But these have little applicability when it comes to rich data services. Historically, managing interconnect has been relatively easy because its been tied to nailed-down circuits, says Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy at NetCracker Technology Corp., an inventory management vendor. But it gets uglier and uglier with things like VoIP and broadband wireless. Now, youre measuring packets as opposed to minutes, and packets get bounced around the network and across geographies. And while all that is happening, carriers must source content and rich-media services, which can change every day. So the new interconnect question becomes, how do you manage all this? Given the changing marketplace, sourcing services, content and connectivity translates into dealing with Layers 1 through 7, not just 1 through 4 anymore. Thus, carriers now are looking at a broader range of functions to fulfill interconnect requirements, leading first and foremost to a need to integrate, says Hassan Iftikhar, vice president of product management at Intec Telecom Systems plc, which offers a range of solutions for wholesale trading, routing, mediation, measurement and billing. A lot of functions now necessary are already there, but managed by different systems and departments, he notes. There may even be an internal manual exchange of data. Integrating systems into a holistic wholesale solution to manage the next-generation business gives operators an advantage in rolling out new services faster. You must get the right data to the right people at the right time. Integration can be tamed by consolidating to one interface instead of disparate ones for each component, says Kerbey Altmann, director of VoIP systems at service management company Sigma Systems. For operators wrestling with a new infrastructure, it becomes a looming issue, technically and operationally. But thats one of the things IMS and OSS standards are all about. Also, one input and database to feed that range of OSS components is becoming a critical interconnect need. In an applications-oriented world, the subscriber becomes the account focus rather than siloed services tied to a phone number. This rise in complexity is potentially a giant obstacle for traditional carriers, but a centralized ID management strategy can give them a Get Out of Jail Free card. You typically have two-to-four individual access points in an account; phone numbers and IP addresses, says Mewada. And you now have content and data delivered across all of these from a variety of sources; carriers want to consolidate this information on one platform with one account point to track usage, but also licensing and intellectual property rights. You cant just think about circuits anymore. Network inventory platforms also can address the need for a complete subscriber picture. When it comes to IP services, you need to track who is the subscriber, what are the devices involved, whats provisioned from who and whats billed, says Preston Gilmer, vice president of product marketing at Sigma Systems. A central repository for that data enables troubleshooting, diagnostics and optimization. If you dont have a subscriber-based service-to-network view, you dont stand a chance going forward. End-to-end OSS automation is part of the challenge too. It takes deployment knowledge and experience along with management and consulting, says Gilmer. You have to get people to work together and map out processes. You can have the best software in the world, but if you dont have the operations down, thats meaningless. Especially when were talking about two-way broadband-enabled services nothing exposes operational weaknesses more than the inability to meet third-party requirements. You need to streamline those partner interactions more so than ever before. Aside from a need for automation, partnership management in the IP world goes beyond the traditional rate negotiation and tracking to include resource commitment, coordination and auditing. You must keep a close eye on the partner relationship, says Mewada. For one, you must ensure there are the underlying resources required to fill order requests to partners, and provide visibility to what youre contracted for and for how much. Its an emerging challenge. Its not a huge market now, but it will be going forward as bandwidth needs increase. Then, of course, theres billing. Cycle times become critical as IP-related services and content continue to be rolled out. Users want real-time service delivery and account changes when it comes to applications and a carrier cannot afford for it to take weeks to register changes in the interconnect system. The problem is that carriers bill monthly, while content providers insist on weekly, and sometimes daily, payment. All these new services mean there are apples and oranges in the accounts, says Nick Milner, CMO at revenue-assurance vendor Azure Solutions. Its very different when it comes to content and applications, where you settle with partners before you even get a retail bill out. You may have users consuming thousands of downloads, and the partner wants payment. Then there may be disputes, but youve already paid. So you need a true end-to-end picture. And ideally you would have the system running on dummy data before you turn up a new service. Otherwise, interconnect charges can create a huge revenue hole. You must build an audit system around the use of resources, says Mewada. Have the physical infrastructure, but you should also have a logical soft process. Once Sarbanes-Oxley came around and revenue assurance became important, it turned out that interconnect is a big leakage bucket. If you are growing out of control, and thats 10 [percent] to 12 percent per year, be assured you are leaking revenue due to interconnect because of the lack of synchronization between the resources committed and the resources used. You must align processes and get the right OSS in place so you can fix it as it evolves to high-end services. Visibility is another key to winning the new interconnect game. Although interconnect is potentially a big cost, its also an enormous revenue driver, says Milner. It is often the second-largest paycheck after retail-billing. But whoevers in charge of signing and adding new partners needs to look at the true costs and revenues. There seems to be a blind spot in adding new services in terms of the associated cost. For example, a carrier launching domestic VoIP and charging a flat fee may not be prepared for users calling international numbers, even if its a domestic service. So the carrier gets stuck with termination charges, and meanwhile theyre charging the consumer a flat fee, says Milner. You also have to ensure that they have a full end-to-end picture to guarantee the margins. Thats always been true with calls, but content and other types of services, as we go forward into the next generation, will be more challenging. For instance, SIP-based applications, like video conferencing, are on the rise, which the operators likely will not host on their own. Often youre layering on an application from a hosted provider and you need an interconnect gateway, says Gilmer, how do you ensure that provider knows what services go with each sub? And what if the ASP is servicing multiple service providers? You need a product-to-service matching of order information between the third party and the network operator. Despite a plethora of coaching, the evolution to IP-based applications is likely to present a learning curve when it comes to interconnect playing field. Best practices in some ways are postmortem, says Mewada. When it comes to interconnection for the next generation, they are evolving now, and we dont yet have a body of knowledge to dissect. All we really know is that interconnect will get more complex, not easier. Links Azure Solutions www.azuresolutions.com Intec Telecom Systems plc www.intec-telecom-systems.com NetCracker Technology Corp. www.netcracker.com Sigma Systems www.sigma-systems.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: 03/2006 Final Curtain Falls on UNE-P By Kelly M. Teal MARCH 11, 2006, IS THE day UNE-P lease rates become mere footnotes to the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The day has been anticipated for a few years and been part of the official record since the FCCs ruling in December 2004. Because of this long lead time, the deadline is a non-event in the industry, says Steve Davis, senior vice president of public policy at Qwest Communications International Inc. I dont see the transition date as being very material, Davis adds. The first of Qwests agreements was signed a yearand- a-half ago with MCI Inc. [now part of Verizon Communications Inc.] Qwest has transitioned 95 percent of its CLEC customers onto separate arrangements such as Qwest Platform Plus, the carriers alternative to UNE-P, he says, calling the negotiations very positive. Kristen Shore, BellSouth Corp.s director of CLEC negotiations, also says the March 11 changeover is turning out to be just another day. BellSouth has wrapped up most of its CLEC talks and most people have known where they were going for a long time, she says. Although she doesnt know the exact number, Shore says BellSouth has switched the majority of its UNE-P customers to other billing agreements. Stragglers will have to sign new documents soon, or switch to business models that rely on VoIP, third-party providers or facilities, to avoid paying higher lease rates. Similarly, AT&T Inc., formerly SBC Communications Inc., has moved more than 90 percent of its lines off UNE-P and onto other pricing structures and the company is working to obtain agreements on the remaining 10 percent, says spokesman Michael Balmoris. Verizon didnt respond to requests for comment, but the phone company told PHONE+ in an interview last fall it had completed commercial agreements with more than 120 providers for its commercial dial tone platform, Advantage. This figure represents more than 90 percent of its former UNE-P lines. The Bells assertions that they have transferred the majority of their agreements with competitive carriers to commercial deals dont surprise Jason Oxman, senior vice president of legal and international affairs for competitive industry association COMPTEL. Because the RBOCs require the arrangements to be kept confidential, Oxman and others can only speculate as to the nature, and results, of the negotiations. AT&T and MCI together made up the vast majority of the nations UNE-P lines, he says. So the migration has gone, from the Bells perspective, quite smoothly. Oxman adds all of COMPTELs members have tried to work out favorable commercial agreements with the Bell companies, and some have been successful. But, he adds, we dont know a lot about whats happening. ... We have heard from members that have had a great deal of difficulty in negotiating. For COMPTEL and its members, Oxman says, March 11 and the end of UNE-P is the best evidence of the success the Bells have had in squelching local competition. In his view, AT&T and MCI the two largest local carriers could not compete as standalone companies in a world without regulated UNE-P pricing, and he predicts the same ill fate will befall competitors in the broadband industry, now that the FCC has deregulated DSL services. One of the COMPTEL members that has signed new commercial agreements with the RBOCs is Lightyear Network Solutions LLC. We are in that game as big and as fast as we can be, says J. Sherman Henderson, president and CEO of Lightyear and chairman of COMPTEL. To be in this business, you have to provide local service; thats the story. The challenge now, he adds, is to find alternative ways to provide local service to residents and businesses. However, he says his company has no plans to wean itself from its commercial agreements, which he says in certain geographies are invaluable. Even though March 11 is likely to pass with little fanfare, the end of UNE-P pricing will land many former UNE-P resellers into yet another regulatory scrap. This time it will be over regulation of IP-based facilities they deploy to support customers that previously used resold UNE-P lines. As policymakers pursue another telecom rewrite, they will have to consider the impact of IP services, which did not exist 10 years ago, and determine how those technologies fit into Universal Service Fund payments, intercarrier compensation rules, Homeland Security, E911 requirements and more. Links AT&T Inc. www.thenewatt.com BellSouth Corp. www.bellsouth.com COMPTEL www.comptel.org Lightyear Network Solutions LLC www.lightyear.net Qwest Communications International Inc. www.qwest.com Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: 03/2006 Peering Into the Future Larger Players See Potential of VoIP Interconnection Services By Charlotte Wolter VOIP PEERING SERVICES ARE young, but already the sector is seeing significant growth and change. Launching as small communities comprising a few nascent voice-over-broadband providers, the services now are signing up major carriers, refining their business models and facing new competitors a sure sign of success. While VoIP is becoming pervasive, most VoIP service providers remain islands of service disconnected from other VoIP service providers except via the PSTN. But VoIP peering providers are making inroads quickly into that growing market, enabling direct VoIP-to-VoIP connections that are less costly and of higher quality. So far, the two most prominent providers of service have been Stealth Communications Inc., which operates the Voice Peering Fabric (VPF), and XConnect Global Networks Ltd., based in the United Kingdom. A new contender just announcing its service in mid-February is IPeerX Inc. Neustar Inc., which has played a role in traditional peering is said to be eyeing the transaction aspects of peering, while Equinix Inc., which provides IP peering, is said the to be looking at a similar service for voice packets. NEW INTEREST Stealth has scored a coup announcing this month AT&T Inc. has joined the VPF. The carrier will provide access to its nationwide long-distance network to all members of the VPF through direct VoIP connection. This will save the members the expense of provisioning PRIs and setting up gateways in order to terminate traffic to the PSTN. AT&T will not yet peer traffic as VoIP, which is a big step for a company like AT&T, says Shrihari Pandit, CEO of Stealth Communications. It also will not participate in the VPF communitys settlement-free peering. Multilateral peering will grow, says Pandit, but it will still take time to move a lot of traffic onto VoIP. But, until then, this will allow companies like AT&T to understand how it functions and for VoIP peering to mature. In addition, Stealth recently added to its stable of carrier members XO Communications Inc., one of the largest CLECs in the United States. And Stealth has been chosen to provide VoIP peering services at One Wilshire in Los Angeles, the leading telecom hotel on the West Coast. XConnect, too, has signed up prominent new customers, including most recently a consortium of five Dutch cable companies providing VoIP to nearly half a million customers. They are doing peering, not just to get rid of minute charging, but to create true connectivity, island to island, so to speak, says Eli Katz, founder and CEO of XConnect. Katz anticipates the cable operators in The Netherlands will exchange traffic on a settlement-free basis. We are seeing increasing take-up of the concept of settlement-free peering, said Katz. Not that we are doomsday sayers and billions of dollars (in settlement fees) are about to disappear. Settlement still will be with us for a while. What we are seeing is the beginning of settlementfree relationships. NEW PLAYERS Newcomer IPeerX was built on the more than 100 VoIP companies that currently peer with Free World Dialup, the free VoIP service established by pulver.com, and now counts 130 VoIP entities as members. The companys revenue plan is somewhat different from other providers. Fees are on a per-call basis, and are only for completed calls. In addition, IPeerX will offer rulesbased routing, which allows service providers to set thresholds for price and quality, and IPeerX will complete only those calls that meet those criteria. IPeerX also provides settlement for special features, such as information services (e.g., weather and sports) or multimedia calls. Further, the company will be adding support for presence management, which will allow users to be tracked to their preferred device, and address bridging, which allows users to place a call without using a phone number, such as to an e-mail address. According to IPeerX, its services also can apply to other forms of IP communication, such as video calls, instant messaging and short messaging service. NEW IDEAS Even though it is really a nascent service,VoIP peering already is maturing its features. One of these is fully scalable ENUM, a service important for carriers and enterprises as numbers begin to move onto VoIP en masse. If you think about how local number portability works today, numbers are ported in quick order and it all works really well, says Don MacNeil, vice president of carrier service operations at XO Communications Inc., a customer of Stealths Voice Peering Fabric. As we get into ENUM, coincident with the initial peering, we are beginning to do voice peering with companies that are not necessarily accustomed to operating communication, especially voice networks, such as large enterprises. So, while local number portability is good from an operational standpoint, ENUM has to get more maturity. The notion of an enterprise tracking and listing numbers completely on an individual basis represents a management challenge. All VoIP peering service providers are set up to perform settlements. And settlement-free peering is a new idea in voice, but one that is well-established on the Internet, generally. Dubbed multilateral peering by the industry, the concept is that by signing up for a VoIP peering service, a service provider joins a community of other VoIP providers that exchange traffic without settlement within the operating rules of the VoIP peering service. In multilateral peering all members of a peering service agree to policies, such as publishing all phone numbers in a registry and providing access to that information for free. There also may be policies about protection of that information so that commercial rivals do not have access to it except to terminate calls. Further, there also may be policies about security and the quality of traffic sent to the peering service. We see that, when discussing connectivity between voice-overbroadband players, and they want to peer with another voice-over-broadband provider, they prefer settlement-free, says XConnects Katz. We anticipate that MSOs (cable operators) in the Netherlands will be settlement-free relationships. So we are seeing increasing take-up of the concept of settlement-free. Multilateral peering is more than a convenience, Katz says, it is vital for the emerging IP-to-IP communications to gain rapid global penetration. Some feel VoIP peering has potential drawbacks, particularly if it emulates current traditional peering. The more VoIP islands there are, the less their value is, but if everyone wants to have connections between VoIP islands and everyone jumps into the idea of a VoIP clearinghouse, you are replacing one set of islands with another set of islands, says Henry Sinnreich, CTO at pulver.com, and a longtime contributor to SIP efforts in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Also it is not a scalable business. If three carriers use settlement house A and others use B and in China they use C, that is not scalable. You would have to have a lot of arrangements, complete with meetings with lawyers and complex technology behind it. SPEERMINT: Peering More Than Voice There is a new standards effort in the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) surrounding peering, dubbed SPEERMINT (Session PEERing for Multimedia INTerconnect). The name itself explains the groups goals: Peering will be important for all multimedia communication, not just voice. The groups mission statement reads: While voice calls are the primary motivation for this today, other forms of real-time communication are and will continue to evolve as natural additions to such peering. Therefore, the focus of this working group is best generalized to describe calls as sessions, and to note that such communications are inherently real-time in nature. Specifically, the groups charter is to focus on realtime session routing architectures for Layer 5 networks and the applications where they might be used.The work will specify various types of application flows, such as signaling and media, and both trunking and peer-to-peer flows. Further, SPEERMINT will develop mechanisms to provide feedback on network operation, such as congestion control, so dynamic policies may be used. For the future, the group may seek to expand its work to cover QoS mechanisms or Layer 2 and Layer 3 peering to support real-time session peering. Links AT&T Inc. www.att.com Equinix Inc. www.equinix.com IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) www.ietf.org IPeerX Inc. www.ipeerx.com Neustar Inc. www.neustar.com pulver.com Enterprises Inc. www.pulver.com Stealth Communications Inc. www.stealth.net XConnect Global Networks Ltd. www.xconnect.net XO Communications Inc. www.xo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TELECOM-CITIES Current searchable archives (Feb. 1, 2006 to present) at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Old searchble archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
