Converged Service Assurance

Consumers Demand Quality Voice and Video

Brix Networks — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:11:41 GMT

I ran across Robin Gareiss’ article on bandwidth demands soaring in Network World today and thought I would discuss the consumer side of the problem as well.

She mentions that:

“[Network World] asked IT executives about bandwidth growth to the branch, and 98% of them said they had increased bandwidth in 2007 - on average by 80%. And for 2008, 90% expect to increase bandwidth by an average of 66%.”

This is great information for branches, but how does that affect telecommuters and consumers?

I personally work from home about 60% of the time and have found increasing problems getting into our corporate VPN. Now, while our IT department may not appreciate me mentioning this, it is through no fault of their own. This is due to the sheer number of users trying to access our internal resources from outside our firewall. We’re simply oversubscribed.

The coincidental thing is that I was simultaneously having a similar problem on my own home network. Being a confessed geek, I do have a home network that consists of several computers, printers, and other devices that consume bandwidth. I regularly move music and video across my network (I love my AppleTV) and find that accessing the Internet with my puny DSL line is simply killing it.

What did I do? Well, like any good consumer, I went and bought the latest and greatest in consumer technology: Gigabit Ethernet. Yes, I have twelve ports of “Gig-E” in my home. That really does nothing for my small DSL line, so the router has QoS to help. I accelerated both web access and email (to make my wife happy). This helped me tremendously, but I wondered what all the other “average” people would do in this situation.

How will service providers handle the growing need for bandwidth due to increased data for applications like video over IP(my major downfall due to my rampant love of Itunes) and voice over IP? I saw the problem on my own network and could handle my own prioritizations, but what of my friends and family? I don’t think they’ll be so fortunate.

Service Providers: Be warned, the killer apps are here and they are video and voice! How will you respond?

Philip Powell
Product Management
Brix Networks

The Quality Imperative - From Carrier Ethernet to VoIP and IPTV

Brix Networks — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:50:25 GMT

Pulver Media has just created a new Web 2.0 community called PulvermediaCommunity that is designed to bring the company and people who are involved in Pulver events together to discuss the future of the industry. Carl Ford created this community on the social networking platform ning (www.ning.com).

On the site, Carl started a discussion called "Is Ethernet our only landline future" which asks:

With so many home and enterprise networks adopting WiFi, is it logical to expect that the future interface to fixed line network will be Ethernet?

In the discussion, he references a presentation from the Fall VON given by Charlie Baker, Director of Product Management at Brix Networks that goes over the need for quality of service (QoS) to be implemented from the Ethernet core all the way through to advanced applications such as VoIP and IPTV.

The presentation is available on the site, but you'll need to register. But don't worry... registration doesn't start a flood of spam messages to your email inbox. And, there's some great information about assuring services from the core all the way down to the individual user.

Wireless Carriers Getting Out of the Network Business

Brix Networks — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:44:44 GMT

During the recent Fall VON show in Boston, I was asked an interesting question while serving as a panelist on one of the panel discussions: "If you can help monitor the quality of a network, what advice do you have on building a high-quality network?"

I thought of various ways to answer the question, and then I had a mini-revelation (at least for me):

Wireless network operators are actually getting out of the network business as their services evolve.

Peering aside, the outsourcing arrangements for long-haul transport -- Ethernet, microwave, or other -- are just the beginning. The real innovations are coming from the wireless carriers of the world as their services evolve and they realize that profits come from service differentiation and not providing the network.

Wireless backhaul over Ethernet is all the rage, as wireless operators switch mobile traffic from their TDM backhaul networks to Ethernet networks. This switch involves replacing the T1 lines they are currently using to connect the Mobile Switching Centers (MSCs) to their cell towers. This switch to backhaul Ethernet delivers lower operating costs and the ability to quickly and easily add bandwidth on-demand for their revenue generating applications, like mobile video, mobile data, and VoIP. By getting out of the network business, wireless operators are truly concentrating on their network core and the radio connections needed to deliver next-gen services.

Want further proof? Think about the recent picocell/wi-fi announcements from Sprint and T-Mobile. The T-Mobile HotSpot @Home service takes full advantage of wi-fi service whenever possible: your mobile phone will switch to your home broadband connection, a T-Mobile hotspot in a Starbucks, or any open hotspot. And Sprint's AIRAVE service takes a slightly different path, automatically connecting your mobile phone to the Sprint mobile service using your home broadband connection without switching the phone to the wi-fi network.

What does this mean for the consumer? It means that a lot of these customers will be tempted to ditch their landline phones and have a single phone number via their mobile carrier. If their phones switch to their home broadband connection, the quality increases immensely over having to get their service from a distant cell tower. For example, I have trouble at home connecting to my Sprint service, but the AIRAVE service will allow me to have reliable access to my mobile service at home.

For the mobile operators, however, this essentially removes the "controlled" world of Carrier Ethernet from the equation and introduces the wild and wooly Internet into the mix. Now, mobile carriers cannot enforce a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the backhaul provider because they are not paying for backhaul services. Customers can connect to their mobile provider on any type of broadband connection, which means that customers will complain about voice quality to their mobile operator when, in reality, the operator doesn't have complete control of the quality of the connection. It's a good thing we've been trained to expect lower quality mobile phone calls these days because mobile operators will be at the mercy of broadband home network providers.

In addition, the wi-max deployments in the last mile will bring even further confusion to the mobile service equation, as not all mobile operators will be managing wi-max deployments in their network. Some will outsource the entire wi-max operation and some will connect their wi-max extensions to their Ethernet backhaul connections and finally to an MPLS core. This combination of network layers introduces a number of complexities and interdependencies that increase the risk factors for delivering a quality user experience.

In the end, wireless carriers are choosing to lose control of their network infrastructure to save on capital costs, and are now looking for creative ways to validate and troubleshoot their next-generation revenue services. Deploying additional layers of software and hardware, or rolling trucks to manage this environment, is highly impractical and cost-prohibitive. In response, operators and equipment vendors are developing new standards to measure and troubleshoot across these network domains and quickly trying to adapt to an unpredictable environment for mission-critical applications.

Deploying end-to-end converged service solutions at strategic points throughout their network that can provide visibility of core transport, backhaul transport, and access availability is the best way to retain customers who have switched from their landlines to next-generation mobile services that take advantage of the cost savings of wireless Ethernet backhaul.

Charlie Baker
Director, Product Management
Brix Networks

IPTV Will Require Creative Marketing

Brix Networks — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:36:06 GMT

IPTV brings a host of benefits to service providers, including another competitive service offering to add their converged service bundles. However, uptake for IPTV services in the United States has been slower than expected.

So, IPTV service providers are starting to get creative. There is a post on the Daily IPTV blog by David Cotriss titled, "Ice Cream Trucks, Freebies and... IPTV?" that discusses the innovative ways that IPTV service providers are trying to get the word out about their offerings. Here's an excerpt from the blog posting about local guerrilla marketing using an ice cream truck:

“Because Verizon's and AT&T's services are still available in very limited areas, they're focusing on locally-targeted advertising and promotion,” said Len Feldman, director of IPTV analysis at Multimedia Research Group, Inc. “For example, in Connecticut, AT&T is using an ice cream truck that's equipped with a large flat-panel display to introduce U-Verse to potential customers.”

This is an example of innovative word of mouth at work. This gem comes via a story in the New England-based Hartford Courant, which explains that the truck circles “Little League fields, train stations and suburban cul-de-sacs” showing U-verse programming. AT&T is also using wine and cheese parties and movie nights, among other methods, to lure customers where service is available. There’s no indication of how effective these methods are so far.

This type of localized marketing can create a grass roots momentum shift for IPTV service providers, as customers in these communities see local involvement and a willingness to participate in the community. In fact, sometimes the community will get involved if there is a local champion:

The most outrageous example, however, comes by way of the “Bobby Choice” campaign, in which a Norwalk, Connecticut man is using the fictional name Bobby Choice to campaign against Cablevision’s monopoly in the city, hoping to give residents more choice of cable providers. His web site, www.bobbychoice.com, documents his activities as he embarks on the campaign. He has the backing of AT&T, and the campaign is aimed at generating buzz about U-verse. While it’s unclear whether the campaign will extend beyond Norwalk, the man “Bobby Choice” received a year’s free subscription to U-verse as part of the campaign, and is now holding a fictional contest to award five other residents the same prize.

Part of the reason that IPTV providers are using these innovative tactics is the uphill battle they are waging against incumbent cable providers. Digital cable quality is excellent, and subscribers are happy with their service.

One way that IPTV can start to compete is offering bundles of converged services, which include IPTV as well as voice, data, and mobile services. When bundled at a very competitive price, consumers are more willing to try new services in order to save money and simplify their billing.

But in order to survive and retain new subscribers, these bundled services need to be solid - i.e. provide a quality customer experience. And, they all need to deliver at the quality level of existing services. The IPTV service needs to be at the same quality as existing digital cable, or customers will leave, often taking all of their service dollars with them.

Converged service assurance is now essential to competing for triple play and quad play dollars in an increasingly disruptive market. When all of the elements of a successful converged service offering deliver a quality user experience, customers are happy and continue to subscribe month after month.

Converged Service Assurance and the Skype Outage

Brix Networks — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 13:54:22 GMT

Recently, Rich Tehrani posted an interesting article about the recent Skype service outage over at his VoIP Blog. For those who don't know, the Skype VoIP service was down late last week. Skype, to it's credit, has gone on the record about what happened on August 16th to cause the outage.

It turns out the outage was caused by a bug in Skype's peer-to-peer network resource allocation algorithm. When a recent Windows patch was released by Microsoft, it caused millions of users to update their PCs and reboot, which rebooted their Skype software in the process. This unexpected network load, coupled with the bug in their algorithm, caused the network to crash. Skype, in no way, blames Microsoft for the issue, and claims to have the bug fixed to prevent further service disruptions of this type.

In his VoIP Blog, Rich Tehrani makes some great points about ongoing testing and monitoring of your IP-based applications. In the article, Rich states:

While some journalists have come to the conclusion that VoIP is no longer reliable because of this outage the reality is that a software bug stopped the network from functioning properly and this had nothing to do with the inherent reliability of VoIP.

Still, when you leverage the benefits of IP communications you must also be aware of the responsibilities that come with the technology. Yes, you now have some responsibilities you may not have been aware of. Much the same way you now know to but a UPS on your e-mail server, you need to ensure you have adequate network management and security in place when you use VoIP on a regular basis basis.

In other words, take this outage as a learning experience. Learn to test your VoIP network. Learn to monitor your IP communications network. Learn to have redundancy in your IP telephony network. It is far better to be prepared than to be left without your vital communications systems.

With converged services like VoIP and IPTV, it's imperative to continuously monitor the health of the IP communications infrastructure, right down to the customer premise. Continuous monitoring through passive testing, based on well-established thresholds for key performance metrics, will allow service providers to spot potential problems before they happen. And, with active testing, problems can be pinpointed and service outages can be avoided.

In the case of the recent Skype outage, a converged service assurance solution may not have been effective in preventing the service disruption, but there may have been some warning that the levels of service were degrading beyond usefulness. This may have alerted the network engineering team sooner, and perhaps helped pinpoint where the issues were sooner.

This is a lot of speculation on our part, but more information when it comes to mission-critical services like VoIP is definitely better than less information. As IP communications extends its reach into more and more organizations, service providers and enterprises alike need to ensure there are ways to monitor the health of their network and their applications. A comprehensive, end-to-end converged service assurance solution is the only way to effectively ensure the uptime of these applications.

You can check out Rich's VoIP Blog and the article about the Skype outage here.

U.S. Behind Europe in VoIP Adoption

Brix Networks — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:20:59 GMT

According to research from In-Stat, the gap in VoIP adoption rates between the U.S. and Europe is growing. According to In-Stat, more than 14 million Europeans subscribed to VoIP services in 2006, with a total number of 19 million VoIP subscribers in Europe at the end of 2006. The firm forecast the number of VoIP subscribers to nearly double to 34 million subscribers by the end of 2007.

In contrast, there were only 4 million new VoIP subscribers added in the U.S. during 2006, with a total number of 10.6 million VoIP subscribers. According to In-Stat, the number of VoIP subscribers is expected to grow by only 50% in the U.S., with a total of 15.9 million VoIP subscribers expected by year's end.

A story posted on the Red Herring web site cites Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala as to the reasons for the lower adoption rates in the United States:

"...demand for VoIP services was lower in the United States than in Europe because traditional phone services are cheaper in the U.S. and Americans also make far fewer international calls.

“Where the value proposition for VoIP is simply cost savings, you are never going to see the kind of adoption rates in North America that you see in Europe,” Mr. Kerravala said.

As carriers continue to see decreased revenue from standard telephone offerings, converged services like VoIP and IPTV will provide a path to greater revenue and profit margins. And, service assurance will provide a method for reducing operational custs and customer churn.

To read the complete story, please visit the Red Herring web site.

IPTV Quality is Key to Customer Retention

Brix Networks — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:54:20 GMT

David Cotriss at the Daily IPTV blog has posted a story called, "IPTV: It's All About the Quality." In this post, there is an interesting discussion by Steven Hawley, senior analyst at Multimedia Research Group, in which he goes into the three nested concerns for IPTV quality:

"A discussion of 'QoS' in an IPTV context is actually three separate but nested concerns: Video Quality (VQ), which refers to the video content itself – conformance to color and resolution benchmarks, which in many cases is mandated contractually by the content owner; Video Quality of Service (V-QoS), which refers to the error-free video delivery from the operator’s facilities to the customer premises over the broadband wide-area network; and Quality of Experience (QoE), which refers to the overall IPTV user experience, including application responsiveness, functionality, usability, and the service context that surrounds it."

In the piece, Hawley elaborated on the technical challenges associated with retaining customers for any IPTV service:

"To prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor (churn), the operator has to pay careful attention to technical factors across the deployment – which is best viewed as an IPTV delivery ecosystem. There are technical factors in all parts of this ecosystem. The complexity of the ecosystem makes it very expensive to implement, so to minimize capital equipment and software costs, IPTV operators assume an oversubscription model – in other words, they must deploy enough equipment to serve under 'average' conditions, yet recognize statistically-determined peaks, rather than design the deployment for full-time peak capacity.

Part of the solution for managing the complexities of IPTV deployments is to "build in" quality from Day One. An integrated service assurance solution helps IPTV operators manage customer expectations by staying in front of potential bottlenecks and being able to pinpoint problems quickly when customers do call. And, endpoint monitoring all the way to the CPE can help diagnose issues for specific customers. With IPTV, quality is THE major issue when discussing customer retention and reducing churn.

The blog posting offers some other great information, so please take the time to check it out.

Service Quality and the Telcos: Why Good Enough Isn't Good Enough

Brix Networks — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:52:46 GMT

Dr. Matthew Lucas posted this editorial in the July issue of Billing World and OSS Today magazine. The editorial gives Dr. Lucas' thoughts on service quality and why telcos must go beyond the "good enough" mentality that pervades Web 2.0 applications. In this editorial, Dr. Lucas gives his Top 10 reasons why compromising quality is a bad idea for telcos rolling out new IP-based services.

Here is a summary of the Top 10 reasons:

Service providers aren’t Web 2.0 companies - Most Web 2.0 companies make money from advertising - telcos require paying customers.
New service adoption - Customers are willing to give a new service one or two chances, but three strikes and you're out.
Margins collapse - Support calls cost $6 - $22 per call and truck rolls average $200, killing already tight margins.
Productivity applications will fail - Productivity applications - email, web access, etc. - that are not integrated properly will fail and cause a poor customer experience.
Entertainment services will fail - Unless telcos manage the rollout of entertainment services properly - with good quality - these services will fail.
IPTV will fail - Television service is extremely sensitive to quality, and IPTV requires a service quality framework before rollout or customers will leave.
Churn - The lower the quality of a service, the higher the churn.
Confidence erosion - Poor quality erodes confidence in not only the new service, but your entire brand.
Quality commands a premium - Companies that can deliver quality (like Apple) can demand a premium price for their products and services.
Political capital -Politicians trust telcos, but rolling out services with poor quality will cause politicians to lose confidence in the telcos.

Dr. Lucas concludes his editorial with this:

There is no question that telcos have to get more aggressive rolling out a broad spectrum of new service, and do so at a lower cost and very quickly. That is what IMS and SDPs are all about, and one reason why OSS/BSSs are so important.

In my opinion, though, innovation and speed should not come at the expense of quality. We should not aspire to become a dot.com industry where companies come and go looking for the short buck. If anything, the telecom service provider community should be putting service quality first and investing in quality user experience in every possible way—network, care, billing, applications, devices and services.

Here at Brix Networks, we couldn't agree more with Dr. Lucas. Over the past 12 months, activities around IPTV and mobile services has taken a leap from trial deployments to staged roll-outs to thousands of paying customers. And as the competition increases, service quality will be the deciding factor in retaining customers and selling bundled services over the long term.

To get Dr. Lucas' full explanation for his Top 10 reasons telcos need to roll out new services with quality from the beginning, visit the article on the Billing World and OSS Today web site.

IPTV Services Up 13% Worldwide

Brix Networks — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:29:16 GMT

A recent post on the Broadband TV News blog cited a report from Dittberner that Telco IPTV subscribers grew 13% to 5.4 million in Q1 of this year. The report, entitled “1Q07 Global Broadband Subscriber Survey," also mentioned that PCCW of Hong Kong was the largest telco IPTV operator with 800,000 subscribers, with France Telecom taking second place with roughly 769,000, and the company was in position to overtake PCCW by the third quarter of 2007.

Other interesting facts cited on the blog from the report include:

While France is the country with the most subscribers, Hong Kong, when viewed separately from China, has the highest penetration of the entire broadband subscriber base at 55.6%. It has a developed infrastructure, with short average LOOP length allowing virtually all its inhabitants to receive IPTV services.
With only about 40% of DSL lines being good enough for a TV service, the real penetration in France is about 25% of the addressable market. The country’s lead reflects the leadership of its operators in the IPTV market, which is a product of both the intense competition between DSL service providers, as well as the lack of competition from cable TV operators.
Western Europe still dominates the IPTV market but its share is down from 68% six months ago. Asia’s market share has increased from 28% to 41% over the same period, largely due to growth in China and Japan.
North America increased its share from 2% to 5%, but that was mostly thanks to growth at small independent operators. However, this may soon change as AT&T’s U-verse service is rolled-out. Although the success at IPTV is not likely to impact its cable operator competitors much in the next year, it should push the US into the ranks of the top 10 telco IPTV markets. AT&T could then be the largest Winluce (Microsoft/Alcatel-Lucent) customer.

“The fact that China has finally awarded licences for IPTV means that it will grow quickly and probably come to dominate the market at 7 Million IPTV subscribers within two years,” says James Heath, research director at Dittberner. “Japan is likely to have good growth and may challenge China for a while, but North America, with its entrenched TV operators, will be a slow roll.” IPTV is on the way to becoming an accepted strategy for most service providers. Now the business of making it profitable will be the goal, and customer service will be the focus.

According to the report, here are the top 10 IPTV markets:

France - 1,410,000
Hong Kong - 920,000
China - 720,625
Spain - 427,600
Japan - 304,000
Taiwan - 269,000
Italy - 211,700
Holland - 167,500
Belgium - 149,491
Sweden - 145,000

Mobile Phone Quality… It’s Not Just the Handset

Brix Networks — Tue, 29 May 2007 20:57:39 GMT

As someone who needs to stay on top of the service assurance market, I need to keep up with the latest news. As I cruise the major news sites, somewhere between the story of a bear vs moose tangle and the latest American Idol update, I came across a commentary about the quality of mobile phones from Sascha Segan at PC Magazine.

The article focuses on the sound quality of mobile phones as perceived by the user and takes the angle that the phone itself is to blame. I'll come at the problem from a little different perspective - it takes a lot more than a high quality handset to make a high quality phone call.

Making a phone call is not as easy as it used to be. The old days of direct connections between two people on a pair of wires and always-available service are being replaced by IP-routed backhaul and service interruptions during power outages (check out the latest Verizon commercials about how reliable the old phone network is).

To further complicate the matter, we are untethering our devices from the network and relying on over the air radio transmissions to carry time-sensitive voice traffic. Add to that the ability to
untether the microphone and speaker from the device via bluetooth, bandwidth competition from email and data downloads, and multiple hand-offs between network elements like routers, switches and gateways, and you have a lot of places in the transaction where voice quality can be degraded.

What is a network operator to do? Well, they are promoting quality based on the percent of dropped calls, network reliability and the speed of the network. One network operator is even publicizing the ability to kick the tires for 30 days. But, at the end of the day, all of the network operators are all looking to provide the highest quality experience to a customer, no matter how that customer is accessing the network.

A lot of work is going on in the background to migrate infrastructure to higher bandwidth and higher speed connections to the base stations, create and enforce service level agreements (SLAs) between network providers and network peers, and subjectively measure the customer experience across the network.

Of course, voice is the most time-sensitive traffic carried across the network, and now there are a wide range of services being added to the mix. Comcast and Sprint recently announced Pivot, a new service that links your Sprint mobile phone to your Comcast digital services, such as high-speed Internet and mobile TV. And more converged services like these will continue to tax the bandwidth that network operators currently offer. How these high bandwidth services directly affect the quality of voice is yet to be seen, but a significant investment is being made to architect a network that can handle converged services simultaneously.

In the end, the network operators who take quality seriously (as well as customer satisfaction) are starting to roll out converged service assurance solutions for voice that address the user’s quality of experience two different ways - actively sending traffic between network segments to isolate disruptions before they affect the user's perceived voice quality, and passively assessing voice traffic across the network to discover quality trends before the problems become widespread.

The combination of active and passive testing provides a host of benefits, not the least of which include reduced truck rolls and tighter SLA enforcement. Right now, not everyone is confident enough to drop their landline completely, but with great service assurance coverage, that day is rapidly approaching.

Charlie Baker
Director, Product Management
Brix Networks