about IP-based Service Platforms: ========================================= "Jamie Farrell" 04/27/2004 01:21 PM To: "Pam Kukla" , "Brough Turner" , "Laura Schneider" cc: "NMS" , "Peter Norton" Subject: Converge! article Team: Brough's article for Converge! Network Digest has posted on the ConvergeDigest.com Web site. While the date of the article reads 4/19, it posted this morning. Please let me know if you have any trouble reading the article pasted below. It can also be viewed online at http://www.convergedigest.com/blueprint/ttp04/z1nms1.asp?ID=99&ctgy=1 Best regards, Jamie Farrell jfarrell@fitzgerald.com 617-585-2261 Escaping the Network vs. Services Catch-22 by Brough Turner, CTO NMS 4/19/2004 There’s no doubt we’re migrating to a converged network based on IP and IP variants, but despite years of vendor hype, the transition will take at least another decade. More importantly, its pace will vary by market and by application. Adoption of any new service or new technology follows the same general pattern (Figure 1) with only some variation in timing. The steep part of the curve is an exciting period of transition, but it takes years. For example, TV adoption took just six years to rise from 10% to 70% of US households (and 35 years from its invention to 90% adoption!). In recent years, the number of households with Internet access has been growing very rapidly, but not as fast as TV did. Changes in core infrastructure take much longer. Today it appears that IP-PBXs are entering the steep part of the adoption curve, but with 5-7 year depreciation cycles the transition is likely to take a decade or more. Consumer VoIP may be next, as incumbent operators react to broadband telephony services like Vonage, but if so, we won’t know for sure for at least another 12-24 months. Meanwhile, mobile voice telephony is based on circuit-switching and likely to remain so for at least the next 4-5 years, i.e. the packetization of mobile voice telephony will take a decade or more, starting 4-8 years from now. So operators must be deliberate and selective, investing only where there is clear and immediate return on investment based on cost savings or new strategic advantage that produces new revenue. Deploying Significant New Enhanced Services Today While mobile network upgrades for IP voice and IP multimedia services may take years, network operators and service providers do not need to migrate to IP-based networks before deploying significant new enhanced services. Instead, they can move to IP-based service platforms that are able to connect to existing TDM networks as well as to the evolving IP networks. This approach supports new services and new revenue streams immediately while preserving investments during the migration. In addition, by leveraging web-based service creation tools, IP-based service platforms bring new flexibility, cutting the time and cost of developing and deploying new services. Finally, the early introduction of an IP-based service platform eases the eventual transition to packet network operation by guaranteeing a one-to-one carryover of enhanced service features. Wireless Competition Spurs Exciting New Services On a global basis, mobile telephony is the most rapidly growing communications sector. As a result it’s intensely competitive, fostering a veritable feast of new services, many of which spring up in Asia, propagate to Europe and then come to the US. But 2.5G and 3G mobile networks use a combination of circuit-switched voice and packet data. Thus deploying value-added services in today’s wireless networks requires both IP and TDM support. There is enormous leverage when one platform provides both. The issue is more than cost savings. A combined platform can support new multimodal voice, data and video services – services that utilize a combination of IP data with diverse messaging capabilities, location and presence information, voice connections, speech recognition and Intelligent Network control. Of course not every application requires every capability so flexibility is key. Escaping the Network vs. Services Catch-22 (Continued) While an IP-based service platform is equally valid for plain old voice mail, here are two examples of new services that will help motivate the discussion that follows. The first is a movie finder leveraging the video capability of new mobile phones being sold in Asia today. The operator advertises a "movie info" short code. The user dials the short code and, using speech recognition, accesses movie information by title, actor’s name or local theatre name. Movie previews, i.e. video clips, can be pushed to the phone, followed by lists of performance times at local theatres and maps showing theatre locations. Finally, via voice or keystrokes, the subscriber can order tickets to a particular performance. The second example is custom ringback service, originally deployed in Korea and more recently across Asia. Here the subscriber selects a music clip or other custom audio that a caller hears, in place of normal ringing, when they call the subscriber. This is similar to downloadable ringtones, but in the other direction. With ringtones the subscriber hears the custom audio, with ringback the subscriber provides custom audio to their friends whenever they call the subscriber. To control the service the subscriber interacts via the Web, WAP or interactive voice response, previewing and then selecting audio content. Then the content is delivered into the traditional circuit-switched voice network using Intelligent Network capabilities. Whether it’s plain old voice mail, movie finder, custom ringback or another enhanced service, a new approach to service platforms facilitates old and new services in old, new or hybrid networks. This new approach is based on open modular components connected by IP networks (even if the eventual service is delivered over a TDM network). IP-Based Service Platforms During the past 6-8 years, extensive work has been done to define how next generation packet telephony networks will operate. Two general approaches have emerged, one based on centralized elements (usually called the softswitch model) and the other based on control from the edge of the network (frequently called the end-to-end model). Variants of the softswitch model appear in the work of the IPPC1, the ETSI TIPHON2 project and the 3GPP3. The most vocal supporters of end-to-end VoIP are the SIP community within the IETF4. Each camp divides the work of providing a telephony service, assigning specific functions to specific subsystems, and many deployments combine elements of each model. But in all cases the subsystems are interconnected using IP networks and open, standard, IP-based protocols. While softswitch and end-to-end models differ in their approaches to call control, they share the same elements for media, messaging and other enhanced services – elements like application servers, media servers, speech servers, message stores and content stores. Furthermore, since all packet telephony schemes envision a protracted period of hybrid operation, the new IP-based service platforms are applicable to both packet networks and traditional circuit-switched networks. Thus they can be deployed whether a network has been upgraded or not. Key advantages of these next generation IP-based service platforms are support for new services, reduced cost to develop services and reduced cost to deploy. These advantages flow from the nature of the new platforms. Modular elements and standard protocols foster competitive sources of supply. Typically, the complete solution is still delivered by a large systems integrator or equipment supplier, but now the cost and features of individual elements are visible for all to see. From an equipment perspective, many of the individual elements are able to leverage commercial off-the-shelf products from the information technology (IT) industry, where high volumes drive lower cost and diverse applications drive increased flexibility. Hardware examples include powerful servers, Ethernet switches, IP routers, and firewall, VPN and NAT technology. But equally important are software elements like operating systems, databases, software tools, security and authentication technology, and a rich set of standard protocols developed by responsive working communities like the IETF. Escaping the Network vs. Services Catch-22 (Continued) From an application perspective the new enhanced service platforms leverage Web software tools to simplify development and Web services to support highly scaleable distributed systems. Service creation is simplified by the use of scripting environments such as VXML, CCXML and SALT combined with Web development tools like HTML, Perl and Java. Wherever possible, scripts replace programs and function calls – developers create "pages." This opens telephony application development to a large pool of Web developers. It also fosters distributed applications allowing for highly available services on commodity hardware. And, while it’s hardly specific to Internet applications, newer platforms have a major focus on customer self-provisioning, frequently providing the subscriber a choice of Web, WAP, voice response and SMS interfaces, when signing up for a new service or modifying existing service features. Figure 2 shows an IP-based service platform deployed in a mobile network. The vertical connections in the right hand box represent IP network interconnections, typically redundant Ethernet within a single site and reliable connections on a private wide area network (WAN) between sites (central offices and data centers) within the operator’s network. Figure 2 The model is the same whether it’s connected to a VoIP network via IP over Ethernet through a firewall, or to ISDN or SS7 trunks using media and signaling gateways. Cap and Grow Clearly if one is rolling out a new service like custom ringback, it’s because the associated revenue provides a clear return on the investment in the IP-based service platform that delivers the new service. But what about plain old voice mail? Here it’s possible for a new IP-based service platform to deliver a traditional enhanced service at lower cost while providing a growth path to unified messaging and a smooth migration when the core network eventually migrates from circuit to packet. The modular nature of an IP-based service platform means one common message store, based on commercial servers and RAID disk arrays, can serve for voice messages as well as text messages. And when unified messaging services are desired, it’s straight forward to add a data message switch and additional application server elements. Conclusion Next generation IP-based service platforms are effective for both traditional and new enhanced services. More importantly, they can be deployed whether or not the underlying network is based on circuits or packets. By de-coupling enhanced services platforms and service creation environments from the actual network, service-providers can deploy new services at whatever speed makes economic sense. And, in many cases, the separation of the service layer from the evolution of the transport layer allows the service-provider to provide new services without having to upgrade the network. Regardless of the schedule for circuit to packet in the infrastructure, IP-based service platforms make economic sense today. About NMS Communications NMS Communications (NASDAQ: NMSS) helps its customers increase revenues and returns on investments by enabling enhanced services and efficient networks. Built on unique, open technologies, strategic relationships with application and technology suppliers, and leveraging best-in-class supply chain and integration partnerships, NMS’ offerings operate in today’s heterogeneous networks and are IP-enabled for application and network investment protection. About the Author Brough Turner is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of NMS Communications, where he oversees the evolution of NMS's technology and product architectures. Mr. Turner has a broad business background, and contributes to business strategy and market development at NMS, but his principal focus remains on engineering and technology. His current interests include wireless video, multimodal applications, and 3G wireless infrastructure. Mr. Turner writes and speaks widely on telecommunications topics. He holds a BSEE from MIT.