Making room for competition in a deregulated world. Internettelephony.com article
PAMELA MOFFITT DODGE, 3/30/98
[Pamela Moffitt Dodge is Director of Network Management Product Marketing for the Core Systems Division of Ascend]
internettelephony.com
Deregulation is turning the world of telecommunications upside down.
Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) are no longer closed entities retailing their
services to end users. Now these large providers are wholesalers as well, required to
offer competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) the same services for resale. This
fundamental change in the business environment, like any change, offers ILECs both
challenges and opportunities.
One critical challenge will be to implement a partitioning solution that maintains the
security of the ILEC's information. But ILECs also have a prime opportunity to offer
CLECs or competitive access providers (CAPs) end-to-end services across all sites.
This article will explain the changes bought about by deregulation, explore some of
the new challenges and opportunities--and describe methods of addressing both.
A Changing Environment
Competition is nothing new to ILECs. Until recently, however, the competitors were
completely separate entities with their own physical plants and their own set of
services. Now the Federal government has mandated that ILECs must provide
competitors with access to their key resource: cable.
What does this change mean?CLECs don't have to create their own, extremely
expensive, infrastructure. Instead, they can lease it from ILECs. Because the barrier
to entering the telecommunications market is now so low, an enormous number of
CLECs have sprung up.
This situation creates a tremendous infrastructure challenge for ILECs because they
must share information with potential competitors. When each ILEC was a regulated
company, it relied on a detailed set of procedures for accessing information and
creating network changes. Now that ILECs must make resources available to
CLECs, they have to find new, secure ways to access their key resources.
In addition, the ILEC is mandated to provide the same services to the CLEC as they
can offer to their customer base. In other words, if the ILEC offers a new service to
its customer base, such as customer network management (CNM) or service level
agreement (SLA) reports, the CLEC must be able to access information that will
allow them to offer the same services to their customer base. For the end user, this
means a choice among carriers.
The challenge for ILEC service providers then is to design management applications
that allow them to share information securely, but that do not require a complete
restructuring of their business processes.
Meeting Those Challenges
As the challenges facing the ILECs are examined, it becomes clear that many can be
met through the implementation of new network management software, systems and
standards. Through network management tools, ILECs can securely share
information with customers--both CLECs and end users. And thanks to emerging
standards, applications are becoming available that support both easier integration
into existing infrastructures and new service growth. Network management tools
become the key enablers for true deregulation.
The three key emerging network management enablers are examined below:
The Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) to provide
interoperability between information and management systems,
Partitioning to ensure that information is accessed only by those with
authorized access, and
Customer Network Management (CNM) to provide comprehensive access
without jeopardizing functionality.
The framework of standards called TMN is a key enabler of network management
system deregulation. These standards define the requirements that allow information
to be shared between two telecommunications entities so that end users will receive
consistent information, even when receiving services from different carriers.
Basically, TMN creates a standard format for information that can be recognized and
used by any network software application. Originally developed to address
interoperability problems within a single ILEC environment, TMN is now also being
driven by service management issues such as circuit provisioning and billing. When
the information that Customer One made a call from Point A to Point B, for example,
the format of the collected information can be recognized and used by the ILEC's or
CLEC's billing application.
Prior to the creation of standardized formats, carriers typically had to develop their
own standards and custom applications. While it is useful for an ILEC to have
standards for its own internal use, it is critical to use industry standards when handing
off information to partners or competitors. Standards also make possible the
development of cost-effective, off-the-shelf network applications, thus creating a
more competitive network software environment.
A network management application that incorporates TMN should be based on an
open interface architecture. This type of architecture allows for easy integration into
existing network management applications for functions such as switch accounting
and billing. Fast integration with these existing applications means ILECs and CLECs
can attract new customers and make more money by customizing services and billing
via network management tools.
Now that different carriers can share the same physical infrastructure, ILECs must
logically partition the infrastructure so that each carrier appears to have its own
network. Network management applications let ILECs make multiple, logical, secure
partitions such as virtual private networks (VPNs) on one shared media, all
configurable via a network management station (NMS). Each separate segment or
VPN can have its own policies, bandwidth parameters and other characteristics--and
the ILEC can lease VPNs to CLECs.
The underlying wide area network (WAN) infrastructure is an important element in a
partitioned network. Competitive WAN infrastructures consist of three things:
intelligent elements
scaleable applications
service-level management.
Intelligent elements such as switches are key to security at the physical level of a
partitioned network, since they can handle VPN routing and partitioning throughout
the network. It is also important to enforce security at the physical layer, since it is
more difficult to hack into than the application layer.
Many network management tools try to handle security only at the application layer.
However, this is not as secure and reliable as a two-layer solution that handles
security at the transport layer and uses GUI at the application layer to set policy.
In addition, intelligent elements can allocate bandwidth on a per-customer basis and
deal with provisioning, service guarantees, throughput levels, and more. In fact, the
level of intelligence in a network switch can be a determining factor in how successful
a service provider can be in developing and marketing new services. A service
provider that can provision but not bill, or collect information but not use it, is at a
competitive disadvantage.
Scaleable applications running on client/server based management systems are critical
because they can support more customers and more concurrent users than
centralized management systems. Scalability impacts both ILECs and CLECs, since,
in effect, the network may have two tiers of checking, authentication and policy
setting--ILECs provide information to multiple CLECs, which in turn provide
information to a multitude of end users.
The network management system also needs to scale to support tens or even
hundreds of a CLEC's or ILEC's geographically distributed network operators
simultaneously. This ensures that when an end user calls to sign on for a service or
request a service upgrade, the network operators have the rapid access and
bandwidth to provision the service quickly.
CNM is the easiest way for the ILEC to give visibility into and control of a part of
the network to a CLEC. In the typical CNM model, a service provider uses CNM
tools to allow end users to view and control their own portions of the network. Read
access allows users to see what is happening on the network, while write control
allows the operator to make changes on the network.
An end user can be an enterprise IS manager interested in the activity on frame relay
circuits, or a CLEC network operator controlling an entire network of customer
circuits. For example, the CLEC might want to establish a hierarchical level of
threshold faults. If the number of faults is high for the amount of traffic, the CLEC can
bump up its bandwidth for the day. CNM also enables a carrier to define different
levels of network management service and to customize standard offerings.
CNM applications allow a service provider to securely share information with its
customers. The role of the CNM application is to:
1.authenticate users and their requests
2.mediate user requests for data, and
3.deliver the answers. Authentication pertains to the user login, access to the
appropriate data and the delivery of the response to the customer with
technologies such as secure socket layer (SSL) and encryption.
The best CNM applications provide cost-effective, graphical access to reports,
summary screens and configuration information with Web-based browser
technology.
CNM solutions allow service providers to deliver tangible, 24-hour proof of network
services to their end-users in the form of SLAs reports, which spell out the type and
level of service that users expect to receive. SLAs also allow service providers to
provide a tighter partnership with their customer base, promoting customer loyalty
and retention. It is difficult, however, to provide SLAs in a router-based network,
however, since routers operate on a hop-by-hop basis with little visibility into the
overall quality of a call as a whole.
SLAs are more reliable in a circuit-based network where segments can be logically
separated. Providers can track user traffic in each segment from the time it comes
into the network at one end until it leaves at the other.
This end-to-end approach enables carriers to do such things as set and guarantee
throughput, delay and availability on a per circuit, per customer basis. Customers,
particularly corporate customers, are starting to push for SLAs, and they are fast
becoming a requirement.
A New World
In the emerging telecommunications world, infrastructure does not equal service. Just
because a carrier owns the infrastructure doesn't mean it provides services. And
conversely, a service provider does not necessarily have to own the infrastructure.
As a result, there is a trend to market services and applications rather than
technology--to market e-mail, SNA and LAN delivery rather than frame relay.
Specialized services such as telemedicine networks or legal networks will become
widely available.
Such applications-oriented marketing will require a sophisticated approach to
network management. It will require hardware with intelligence and software to cull
and present information to the end user. Indeed, network management promises to
be the key to the existence of the myriad new services that are just now beginning to
emerge.
Pamela Moffitt Dodge is Director of Network Management Product Marketing
for the Core Systems Division of Ascend Communications Inc.
Visit the Ascend Communications website.
Glossary of Terms
CAP
Competitive access carrier
CLEC
Competitive local exchange carrier
CNM
Customer network management
ILEC
Incumbent local exchange carrier
NMS
Network management station
TMN
Telecommunications management network
SLA
Service level agreement
SSL
Secure socket layer
VPN
Virtual private network
WAN
Wide area network
Any Comments?
Send them to Karen Murphy at msblues@earthlink.net.
www.internettelephony.com
InFocus March 30
c1998 Intertec Publishing Corp., a Primedia company
All Rights Reserved.
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