Leading Telecom Technologists Join Forces to Get a Handle on Convergence

Convergence. The word has been batted around the telecommunications and cable TV industries for years. More than a decade later, it’s still unclear just what it means. However, top technologists from leading telephone companies now are working in earnest to define convergence and address the standards gaps around it.

“Convergence has a new urgency,” said Susan M. Miller, president and CEO of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), a U.S.-based organization committed to rapidly developing and promoting technical and operations standards for the communications and IT industries worldwide.

Recognizing the “urgency to deliver full convergence in a consistent and standardized manner,” the ATIS Technical and Operations (TOPS) Council in August 2006 formed the Exploratory Group on Convergence (EGC). The EGC developed a convergence road map document. Work based on that report moved into committee toward the end of last year and currently is ramping up.

“ATIS has 22 different committees,” said Miller. “So the work that was identified in this [convergence] road map has been moved out into real standardization efforts within the committees. That is ongoing right now. This work was just moved out early in the fall last year, and we’re already producing standards that address the component parts of the report.”

The ATIS committees working on convergence cover a wide variety of topics — from network equipment issues to things like billing and OSS — to provide “an end-to-end view,” continued Miller.

Miller said ATIS knows it’s on the right path with its standards work on convergence because the group has interfaced with all its counterparts around the globe, such as IEEE and ETSI. “We’ve gotten feedback that no one’s looked at it at the layers that we’re looking at it,” she said.

xchange recently spoke with Miller and ATIS Board officers/top industry technologists AT&T’s Chris Rice, BT’s Matt Bross, Qwest’s Pieter Poll and Verizon’s Mark Wegleitner about this convergence effort and why it’s happening now.

ATIS is considering both network convergence and applications/service convergence. The idea is to provide the industry with a common approach by which to collapse multiple networks and service silos, and make services access- and protocol-agnostic. That is intended to produce capital and operational savings at the telcos while enabling them to bring new services and packages to market more quickly and efficiently.

“A rationalized set of standards in the convergence space will provide opportunities to improve how quickly we can build things, get them to market and fix them,” said BT CTO Bross. “Simplification and reusability are key drivers for BT.”

Before this ATIS work, “convergence was a cloud,” said Rice, AT&T Inc.’s former CTO, who’s now executive vice president of Shared Services. (See related story “Chris Rice Talks About His New Gig”).

“Everybody was talking about convergence,” said Rice. “It was the buzzword for everything. But no one knew what it really meant. ... So the EGC was able to get together and say ‘What do we really mean by convergence? What has to happen? What interaction needs to take place? How do these things hand off? What’s the user experience? What kind of user element needs to be done?’ I think it was getting the definition around a lot of it. That, then, helps move things forward instead of just being an industry buzzword.”

Poll, vice president and CTO at Qwest Communications International Inc., and chairman of the TOPS Council at ATIS, added: “What we’re really trying to do is focus on some of the large business problems that members of ATIS face and figure out some answers around where we need work and where there’s probably already a sufficient effort in other places, because we don’t want to duplicate things and create another standard.”

The IP Multimedia Subsystem, better known as IMS, is one of the existing technologies upon which the ATIS convergence effort is building.

Wegleitner, senior vice president of technology at Verizon Communications Inc., said the ATIS work puts the multimedia aspect of IMS into clearer focus. “It puts the M in IMS, I think, because [IMS] was a wireline/wireless initiative for the most part, but everyone realized even when they made it that there was an entirely new dimension to what had to be done here. I think the report and the work that we’ve done with ATIS has really amplified that.”

Four or five years ago, Wegleitner explained, suppliers were talking to Verizon about video solutions and IMS wireline/wireless products as two separate conversations. “I don’t think we were the only ones who said this, but we were certainly very vocal with them. We said ‘Look, we’re trying to create a seamless entertainment, information and communications environment for the customer here that involves more than voice, it certainly involves multimedia. You’ve got to bring this under one umbrella.’ And to some suppliers that was a revelation because they had two separate control infrastructures — one IMS-based for voice and another one handling multimedia or video applications,” Wegleitner said. “Even though IMS carries this inner IP Multimedia Subsystem, we tended to think of it as wireless/wireline convergence vehicle initially. And now, in this report and in our thinking in general, multimedia plays an equal role.”

These top telco technologists declined to specify the timelines and top priorities of the ATIS convergence initiative, instead pressing the message that work will be ongoing and is too wide-ranging to identify any particular standard effort under this umbrella as the most important.

“There are, in fact, aggressive timelines around when the standards are going to be produced,” said Miller. “But convergence, as Mark said, isn’t one of the things where you’re going to say ‘Today we’ve arrived.’ You have to keep reprioritizing the component parts to say ‘This is now more important from a use-case perspective than this.’”

The key outputs of the EGC report, said Poll, are the identification of interface gaps, interoperability and operational paradigms. “If you look at IMS, IMS says there are self-defined interfaces,” he added, offering IMS as just one example. The problem with that, he indicated, is that every supplier has a different interpretation of the set of core standards that are used with IMS, so “you have to create some layer on the top that tells how you’re going to maintain, surveil, provision, bill, etc., what you’re defining as a service versus the way that service happens to be split up among the piece parts,” he said.

Added BT’s Bross: “Once the marketplace smelled that there were line items in carrier budgets called IMS ... you got these companies sweeping their product porfolios into an area, calling it IMS, because there was a budget line item potentially over here. So what happened was the demarcation — even within any organization — of these products was unclear.” But even once you figure out what products are IMS, they certainly aren’t plug-and-play, he said.

Rice concurred, adding that while IMS makes an attempt at standardization, it is still in its infancy. “It’s not like the old days when I went out and bought a 5E and it was all kind of interconnected and it all came from Lucent or even the old Western Electric 1A,” said Rice. “[IMS architectures] are all made up of routers from parties that are unrelated to somebody who might be doing the architecture of that IMS. It’s session border controllers ... multimedia resources, the gateway, the call state control function devices” and each of these devices may come from a different equipment supplier.

In addition to IMS, the ATIS convergence effort seems to tie into Web 2.0 (although IMS and Web 2.0 are also part of another major initiative at ATIS beyond the convergence effort). Bringing Web 2.0 into the fold allows for “innovation at the speed of life,” said Bross.

Beyond the IMS and Web 2.0 issues noted above, telcos also need to decide how to implement quality of service, which protocols to use in various instances, how to deliver particular services on broadband connections (VLAN or vis-a-vis CPE?), which video codec to use and how the addition of a new codec could affect the cost and usability of a wireless handset, and much more, said Rice, noting just a small subset of what needs to be done. So, clearly, addressing and trying to create standards around convergence is a multifaceted challenge, these executives noted.

“It’s just like in the wireless world when you go to another spectrum auction,” continued Rice. “So you have more spectrum, what does it mean? It means another frequency, another chip, it takes my battery life — so it’s all-encompassing. What do I need to have in the end-user device? What do I need to have on the access side? What’s the core infrastructure look like? What’s the management layer look like?

“It’s not like there’s just one thing,” he added.

And while collapsing physical networks is an issue of huge import, convergence as it relates to billing, provisioning and other operational support systems is also key.

“There’s a lot of focus on the network convergence,” said Rice. “But besides getting to a single instance or a single infrastructure, which does help us lower costs and help the cycle time, the IT cost goes down dramatically. Today, I’ve got consumer applications, I’ve got enterprise applications, and I’ve got mobile applications back at BSS/OSS. Every time I want to do something with one or the other on that infrastructure I’m building multiple systems.” But convergence and the ATIS work around it will enable AT&T to “start finally bringing those together and reduce my IT costs as well as my network costs, which is how you get to that cycle time, because some of the cycle time is just in the technology.”

Of course, none of these ideas is necessarily new. As mentioned at the onset of this article, both service providers and their vendors for years have been talking about convergence. And the themes of collapsing multiple networks, abstracting services from the network layer, and expediting the process of service creation and provisioning to allow for faster time-to-market have been key tenets of this vision pretty much from the start. So why do the nation’s top telcos feel such urgency around convergence now?

“I’d like to say the convergence report is some sort of watershed event,” Verizon’s Wegleitner responded. “But I like to think of it more as a very important cog in a very large wheel that has to be a part of the total process, but isn’t in itself going to lead us to the immediate realization of convergence.”

AT&T’s Rice said because technology has advanced enough that the industry now has at least the basic pieces in place upon which to build a standardized convergence strategy, the key drivers for convergence seem to be falling into place.

“Back in ’96 I can remember when we were all creating our ISPs,” Rice said. “I viewed that we needed to use the IP network because it was going to be multimedia. But the protocols weren’t there. The technology wasn’t capable of even doing that. QoS wasn’t there. So I think what Mark and Pieter are hitting on is right on the money: The vision was there long ago, but stuff hadn’t matured enough; the capability wasn’t there. The service enablers and the network enablers are now coming into place. Things are matured, things are advancing, and IMS is a component of how we’re getting there.

“The other thing, I think, is that IP has come a long way,” Rice continued. “Things that weren’t IP-enabled 10 years ago are now capable of being IP-enabled. Video wasn’t capable of being IP-enabled 10 years ago for delivery in the way it is today. We couldn’t have done IP VoD — in the bandwidth today it would’ve been huge. Now you’re seeing IPTV VoD that’s high-quality, high-def, at 5.25 megabits. We see that in the lab today; it’s probably going to be in production soon. How far can it go? I don’t know. But ... the technologies, the compression, are all coming into play.

“This is kind of like the perfect storm, everything is coming together now, and we can begin to implement now,” he said. “But it’s not easy. It’s really complex.”

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