By Keith Willetts, Chairman and CEO, TeleManagement Forum

It seems that every few months a new idea has come to transform the fortunes of the telecom industry. The latest dark stranger to ride in from the West is, of course, IP television - IPTV - where ‘on demand’ digital television content is delivered over an IP broadband connection to the home. It’s a key new service coming out of the fixed-line world, where from your television set you’ll be able to browse and click on virtually any kind of content you can think of.

The potential for IPTV is huge. No only a vast back catalogue of TV, films, education and games but you can imagine a number of options like integrating messaging, phone service and IPTV, so when you’re watching TV and the phone rings, you can get the calling number on your TV screen. And maybe through your remote control you’ll have the ability to pause live TV while you answer the phone or after you see the caller ID on your TV screen, you might be able to push a button that sends the call to voice mail.

Go to any telecom conference or exhibition and suppliers will assault you with “IPTV here and now” demonstrations and sales patter. But the reality behind delivering IPTV as a high quality, customer self-serve, reliable service is a different matter. And that matters because, unlike services such as mobile, where early users were so enamored with the capability that they overlooked dreadful quality; most people already have access to high quality, reliable and cheap video content.

When you get right down to it, IPTV for the masses is going to be delivered over a medium that Alexander Graham Bell would have recognized – the humble copper pair we’ve known for decades. Sure some operators are slowly rolling out more fiber in their access networks, but for most, copper is here for the foreseeable future because the electronics of DSL keep extending its life.

Well at least they do in the lab. Getting high speed DSL as say 8Mbits is fine in city centers but a stretch out in the sticks. But with most homes having multiple TV sets, we are going to need speeds at 20MBits or more to really satisfy demand. The problem for most operators is that their copper access networks are ‘the land that time forgot’ because they have continually thought that they would be replaced by fiber well before now. So in many cases, what many operators will not talk about or admit to is the fact that their access plant may not be up to the challenge of offering these types of advanced services.

While there are other important issues to iron out (such as consolidating the back office) before IPTV can become a reality, we need some debate is what’s happening in the access network and where it touches the Central Office (CO).

Access Networks Key to IPTV Rollout

Down in the access network, it’s 1950 all over again. In the vast majority of cases, you’ve got clay or plastic ducts in the ground with copper cables in them; manholes; telephone poles and metal cabinets in the street where everything is connected up. Forget meshed MPLS, dense-wave anythings- this is the world of poles and holes.

And unbelievably, about 1/3 of an operator’s capital expenditure goes to maintaining these ageing access networks. Most people probably thought copper access networks would have been gone sometime in the ‘90s when fiber technologies were being experimented with and deployed. You might think that WiMAX or fiber will come along and sweep all the copper away, but it isn’t happening because the business case for mass change is weak when compared to life extending copper with DSL. But it isn’t the ability of operators to squirt video down access networks of variable quality and we have that worries me the most.

What I’m concerned with is that along with the technology being frozen in time, the management of external plant is similarly very primitive. Forget advanced databases, most records of external plant are paper drawings, hand annotated and smudged with coffee stains kept in drawers somewhere. Access network data quality is typically very low - often as low as 60% accuracy levels. The backlog for updates is usually very long - typically most drawings are about 10 years out of date.

Think about it. If data accuracy is that low, when you order IPTV or DSL, probably four times out of 10, the copper pair of wires that runs from the CO to your house that the operator thinks is there actually isn’t! Well actually it is, but someone else is using those wires, but the records haven’t been updated. So when they try to provide your service, not only does it not work, but potentially your neighbor’s phone just got cut off too. Sounds far fetched? – no its daily life out there in the access network and on the vast connection frames in the CO. When change in the access network was low because most people already had a phone and anyway profits were vast, that level of inefficiency didn’t matter too much. But with rapid take off of new services that are close to the bone in terms of profitability, all that has changed.

So everyday in North America, Britain, France or just about anywhere else, guys are driving around in trucks and are going up telephone poles and going into manholes sorting out this mess. It’s a global problem, and there are some very real and tangible issues that make up one of fixed line telecom’s “dirty little secret’s”. Daily it costs more than it should to provide services and daily it results in poor customer satisfaction.

Fixing it isn’t as easy as you might think. You can’t do smart OSS/BSS things like auto-discovery into inventory databases because telephone pole, ducts and copper wires are dumb and can’t signal back to you. Historically the answer has been crippling expensive and time consuming manual methods. But just like painting the Golden gate bridge, no sooner than you clean the mess up than it gets degraded again because the access network is constantly changing. Luckily some smart companies are coming up with technologies that can automate the data cleansing process but like a low level toothache, most operators have been trying to live with the problem. IPTV will turn that into a raging root canal!

IPTV: The Killer App or App Killer?

Data accuracy is one of the major barriers to IPTV rollout at reasonable costs and quality, but operators have a bit more to be concerned about.

Providers can’t just start sending content down a phone line to your TV; rather they need to provide a service that’s at least as good as what we already know, which is cable, satellite or DVD. It’s got to be high quality where you switch it on and it need to ‘just work’. To really make customers sit up and move away from these more conventional formats, operators need to cerate really attractive packages of content with neat internet and phone service bundles – the so called triple or quad play - that will be brand new and appealing to consumers.

What will kill IPTV is if they can’t be properly integrated. Not at the TV set level – I’m sure we can figure out how to get caller ID up on the screen - but at the customer service and operations level. Customers want to go onto a website, click on the service options they need in the package and hey presto, it just works.

But the back offices and organization of most operators is going to be major block on this seemingly simple objective. The nightmare will be customers having to deal with different offshore call centers to order each part of the service, get shunted for ever between agents who only handle their bit; get multiple bills and heaven help solving a problem when it your picture is freezing - is it the TV, the IPTV service, the content supplier or what?

IPTV is the first time the telecom industry has launched a service where the customer already knows what to expect – TV is easy and it works when you turn the set on. For it to breakthrough it has to be hassle free, novel and provide a lot more value than the service it is replacing. It has to be competitively priced and probably self-serve. With the current back–offices of most incumbent operators, this is going to be really really tough. Most services are organized into stove-piped divisions with separate customer care and incompatible operational systems and processes. Integrating them is what TM Forum has been preaching for a long time but it’s a long and complex process. Making it happen in time for mass IPTV launches over the next year or two is pretty nigh impossible if an operator is not well into the process of integration of the back-office.

So IPTV may well be a killer app, but without overcoming these significant operational challenges, it could well be an app killer. To keep that from happening, any aspiring IPTV product manager should have a large poster on their wall saying “Remember WAP!!” …And then dust off your resume!