SCTE member since 2002 Title: VP Broadband Technology, Incognito Software Broadband Background: Busch is presently with Incognito Software where he drives technologies for IP provisioning and multimedia service convergence. He has 12 years’ experience in broadband technologies including cable, wireline and wireless. Previously with Nortel Networks as senior technology advisor to the CTO of Cable MSO Global Solutions, Busch has also worked in terabit IP core routing, carrier BRAS IP services, wireless IP access, IP video and VOD, wireline carrier and cable MSO access. You’ve recently written papers on ENUM and PacketCable, voice provisioning and business services. How do you acquire that kind of expertise? Over the past 12 years of working in carrier and cable technology sectors, you begin to find some of the same problems in both areas. It’s the application of the technology that differs. Wireless carriers have long been using ENUM within their networks as a registry service of subscribers’ mobile number to mailbox identifier, which enables ring tones and other media to be sent from one device to another, regardless of network operator. Cable is looking to use ENUM as a registry to locate a peering gateway or even the end phone number dialed from their network to another VoIP phone network, likely another cable operator or other facilities-based VoIP provider enabling them to look up and complete calls without relying on the incumbent carrier in between. On the business service and provisioning fronts, we’ve seen carriers generate high margin revenues from business customers for years. Enabling cable to get a share of this revenue requires looking in on DOCSIS, PacketCable and CableHome standards for the tools needed to serve and provision T-1, Centrex, and SIP. In many applications, provisioning is what combines all three standards simultaneously to build a solution. My approach has been to first understand the technology then apply it to the business problem my customer is looking to solve. In the June issue of Communications Technology, you wrote about sidestepping the PSTN. How urgent a matter has this become for cable operators? The larger you are on the PacketCable subscriber side, the larger the costs associated with dipping the SS-7 network for number lookup and call completion. If you are about to launch PacketCable services, you need to look carefully at the costs associated with tarriffed trunks getting you in and out of the PSTN network. What approach do you recommend? On the operator side, Comcast has been leading the charge here working both with standards bodies and with vendors on the best approach. I believe a solution based on infrastructure ENUM where cable MSOs are peering with one another and with other operators of VoIP interest either directly or via a VoIP peering partner to expose enough relevance per telephone number dialed to find the session border controller or media gateway able to service the call. While this requires business collaboration first among the operators, from a technical perspective, it calls for a baseline for lookup using high performance DNS resolvers tuned for ENUM, ENUM data management solution to establish the logic of NPAs to gateways, and management of records at the resolvers. Last, we need session border controllers, gateways and softswitches capable of interworking between a DNS-based resolution for telephone number lookup and a PSTN-based resolution for legacy services. What was the gist of the VoIP paper you presented at Expo? Go get your commercial subscribers now; there isn’t a single service the carrier is offering that cable can’t replicate or do better. In the Expo presentation, I commented that it is not about convincing the customer to leave the carrier. It is in offering them solutions that preserve the customer investment and perhaps increase the customer functionality at the end of the day, maybe even save the customer money at the same time. You continue in this commercial vein in your September article for CT, where you indicate that manual and user-driven device configurations leave much to be desired. How can MSOs get to the next level? Some of the CPE devices needed to offer commercial services today are outside CableLabs specifications. Many are using SIP for VoIP endpoint control. Provided your softswitch investment allows you to take advantage of this, it’s really about working with your CPE vendors and your provisioning vendor for a solution that makes deployment of new products to commercial customers as efficient as residential products are today. What’s new at Incognito? We’ve been busy working on even more product functionality based on our customers’ input, and looking ahead to new SIP provisioning technologies enhancing our current position of supporting more SIP device and SIP endpoints than any other provisioning solution on the market today.

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