The telecoms operator of the future

Between now and 2011, there is much work to do. Today's integrated operators are barely integrated at all, never mind being fully converged.

Typically operators have one silo which houses the process for fixed voice, including the network, billing systems, sales to order and customer care. Another silo replicates these processes for ATM services, and another silo for ADSL and so on. Countless sums are spent duplicating processes. This is because services have grown up in isolation, often over decades, as is the case with voice or ISDN.

Each silo utilises vendor-specific switches and complex patches to make one piece of equipment work with another. A similar patchwork exists at the organisational level: those responsible for marketing voice services will operate completely independently of those in broadband marketing.

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David Holt, converged services leader, Nortel EMEA, says: "In today's networks, many of the functions associated with user identity and service profile are distributed and replicated across multiple systems."

For example, one may need to provide multiple usernames and passwords to log in to a subscription-based movie website from a wi-fi PDA - even if the site is operated by a company of which you're already a customer, Holt adds.

He says: "IMS can simplify this by housing all of the user's identity and service profile information in a centralised location, which can be accessed by multiple service, application and content providers. So, I would only need to identify myself once, and the network would then know which services I was entitled to use, and how to bill me for them. This will also dramatically simplify the hand-over between networks and applications."

IMS impacts telecoms at many levels: it makes it possible to interconnect IP content over multiple networks so, for example, when you travel to France, you will still be able to access your enterprise applications hosted in the UK.

It provides a simple way for operators to settle their dues with content partners.

It also helps to make the network access-agnostic: the mobile network will plug into the same backbone as the DSL network, and the network will only require one process for authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA).

This means a video call placed on a prepaid mobile phone could be answered on a PC videophone connected to the internet on an unmetered DSL line. During the call, a white-boarding session could be initiated and then closed without disconnecting the video call.

Another important quality is the ability to launch new services quickly, something which is nigh on impossible in the current silo-structured industry.

Without IMS, the future looks extremely desperate for fixed-line telcos - which are fighting on all fronts against mobile operators, systems integrators, web companies and niche service providers.

The response by some is acquisition: if you can't beat them, join them. But that is not a strategy for convergence - it's a strategy for buying market share. In itself, M&A does not deliver next generation services or help to slash costs. The reinvention of the network and all the services elements requires an approach currently finding favour among CIOs of large enterprises: service-oriented architectures.

Preston Gilmer, vice president of marketing for Sigma Systems, an operations support systems (OSS) vendor says: "Business flexibility and agility are critical. Past solutions to service introduction have involved use of separate silos with little or no reuse. But for next-generation services, the information in these separate systems needs to be converged by an SOA-based OSS solution.

"Using the SOA concepts of service componentisation and reuse, the capabilities of the service delivery network and elements can be appropriately abstracted, componentised, and then rapidly reused to speed the creation of new, more complex services."

SOA, IMS, NGN: yet more three-letter acronyms for operators to struggle with. But the path to full convergence is emerging, and these technologies will play a critical role.

Nortel's Holt adds: "The basics are pretty clear now. Operators will need a high capacity, multi-service packet core with multiple wired and wireless options for access. The network will be application-aware, and able to provide the necessary [quality of service] end-to-end to ensure that the customer experience is never impacted by the poor performance of the underlying network.

"The big questions are around how long the different access mechanisms will take to evolve to the point where the applications are delivered totally transparently, without the user knowing or caring how the access is achieved."