|
Author: Dan Bieler
Siemens Communications hosted a conference for industry analysts in Munich yesterday. The focus was on its home entertainment products and service offering, and on IPTV in particular.
Comment: The event had a distinct engineering ring to it and techies had a field day. However, in between discussions regarding broadband remote access servers (BRAS), forward error correction mechanisms, access resource control services, GPONs and the resource and admission control system, one particular theme caught our attention: where to put intelligence?
The question of where intelligence is located matters. The transmission or transport element of home entertainment services is undoubtedly the key revenue and profit generator at present. For example, the revenues from DSL access are higher than the revenues from the additional applications running over it. However, this equation is likely to get a lot more complex as home entertainment matures. The applications element will become ever more important. And applications require intelligence - irrespective of how half-witted and feebleminded the content running over networks might be.
So why does intelligence matter? In a nutshell: because there is always a trade-off between intelligence and cost - and thus margins. As end users demand ever more demanding services, networks and/or devices must become more intelligent to guarantee a satisfactory quality of experience. In an effort to fight providers becoming dumb pipes or boxes, telcos and equipment firms are trying to retain as much intelligence within their "domain" as possible. Telcos argue for placing intelligence at the BRAS level, whilst set-top box providers claim that as much intelligence as possible should reside inside their boxes.
Given that no two networks are alike, there will be different answers as to where exactly intelligence should reside. Thus the path to home entertainment will be different for each provider. To manage equipment has always been a very costly aspect of operations for telcos. The drive towards home entertainment only intensifies this challenge to control costs at the edge and outdoor access.
Siemens' answer is to provide a fairly flexible suit of end-to-end solutions. For instance, it supplies a solution for bandwidth planning, resource admission controlling, CoS-aware scheduling, and policing and shaping. This approach enables service providers to place the per-subscriber scheduler either at the BRAS, the first switch or the IP-DSLAM. Thus it becomes easier for the provider to overcome challenges such as interoperability or upgrade issues.
All operators with IPTV projects in the rollout phase have to navigate through the technological challenges that end-to-end QoS throws up. We believe that Siemens' flexible approach helps providers to build a business case for home entertainment services. Operators that rush through these issues not only risk delays and negative returns on capital invested, but also a blow to their reputation. And this is the real danger of botching up a triple-play offering: operators will not lose a customer for just one service element, but the customer full stop.
|
