Tech Workshops: It’s All About Business Services

Across all technical-session verticals yesterday, the warning to MSOs is clear: get into business services now – including wireless – or face the financial consequences.

According to Jay Stewart, marketing director at JDSU, mobile data is pushing Ethernet backhaul, and there is no doubt there is money to be made in the burgeoning mobile backhaul sector.

“Ethernet can deliver traffic cost-effectively, and service providers know they need a smaller cost per bit,” he says. “JDSU has been doing this for 2.5 years.” Steward does acknowledge that transitioning backhaul to Ethernet is a complicated proposition that includes a three-pronged service-management cycle: service installation testing, service performance and SLA monitoring, and service testing and monitoring.

Stewart does submit one caveat: “It’s not just about the tests you run but about the results you get when the tests fail. The biggest amount of time spent is on tests that fail.”

Here are some of the lessons JDSU has learned during its Ethernet-transition testing:

• When installation testing, verify the actual Ethernet virtual circuit and not a parallel circuit or a management circuit.
• Verify all the circuits defined for the service, i.e., burst rate or committed information rate.
• Verify that your QAM domain mappings are correct.
• Make sure scalability doesn’t become an issue with the number of QAM sessions required.
• Make sure granularity of measurement is not an issue for accurately measuring your SLAs.
• Make sure you have well-defined measurement details for key KPIs: frame loss, frame loss variation, frame delay and availability.
• Verify full transparency of all protocol types.
• Verify that other carriers’ traffic is not interfering with your traffic.

Things will become even more difficult when the new Long Term Evolution networks are being built, adding to an already complex situation. “LTE changes the game,” Steward says, adding that transport QoS and LTE QoS fall into different groups, making end-to-end QoS difficult.

BSS/OSS For Commercial Services

“Business is a big deal for Charter,” says James E. Matthews, vice president/Enterprise Architecture and Strategy for that operator.

As such, Charter has leveraged parts of the next-generation OSS (NGOSS) to develop its enterprise architecture and IT governance practices successfully to reduce the size and cost of its IT portfolio, allowing it to “surgically address” emerging business needs. It also helped company managers come up with a RFI to determine the best vendors with which to work as buildouts continue.

Because Matthews comes from the telecom side of things and has worked closely with the TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) for years, he decided to use that group’s NGOSS Expanded Telecom Operating Model (eTOM) to develop the operator’s Business Reference Model and “bootstrap” its enterprise architecture framework.

“We used the eTOM model to put together our RFI because it has an articulated list of definitions,” he said. “There is no ambiguity when we talk vendor to vendor. This cut down our RFI process from several months to a couple of weeks.”

And when the operator needed a new billing program, it used the eTOM as its basis as well.

-Debra Baker