The Key to Monetizing and Differentiating Ethernet Services
It's one thing keeping your customers happy by providing high-speed connectivity with new technologies like Ethernet, but how do you, as a service provider, guarantee benefit from the investment your business has made? Or put another way, how exactly can you guarantee and increase revenues, and avoid becoming an ultra fast but dumb pipe?
One method is to apply Class of Service (CoS) management to Ethernet service, such as mobile backhaul, so this valuable resource can be differentiated, controlled and regulated according to your rules - applying your rules allows you to protect and increase your revenues.
The only way to manage this and differentiate a service over Ethernet is by adopting a closed loop planning and fulfillment Operational Support System (OSS). The OSS in this case focuses on the CoS within the network at the point when it is designed and built. This article describes the components required in the OSS to achieve this.
Why Ethernet?
The market drivers
Ethernet is the success story of the late 2000s. It is the preferred access strategy of an increasing number of fixed line and mobile service providers across the globe from existing incumbents to start-up rivals. Worldwide service provider revenue for Ethernet services grew 36 percent sequentially in 2008, to $16.9 billion, and is forecast to nearly double to $33 billion by 2013 (Source: Infonetics).
Managing Ethernet Using OSS
Provisioning and managing Carrier Ethernet
Challenges
Carrier Ethernet presents four key challenges not encountered previously by operators using TDM technologies:
- An inability to 100 percent assure performance of sites and emulated traditional technologies over Ethernet;
- The need to guarantee the same end to-end quality as seen with traditional TDM;
- The necessity to right-size Ethernet backhaul infrastructures as data traffic explodes; and
- The requirement to manage the complexities associated with Class of Service and MPLS traffic engineering.
Meeting the challenges
OSS must deliver the following capabilities in order to meet these challenges:
- Inbuilt Class of Service planning and design capability - When a service is delivered using Carrier Ethernet, there are two important factors that the OSS must take into account. Firstly, delivering service according to an SLA and secondly, the service must not impact existing SLAs.
- Admission Control - Carrier Ethernet introduces a new OSS component in the form of Admission Control. Admission Control in the OSS acts as the control point for new and planned Ethernet services. It controls the decision as to whether a particular service is possible against defined rules.
- Holistic approach to plan, build and provision process - In plan, build and provisioning of Carrier Ethernet services, the following components are required: Service Decomposition, Resource Management, Activation and Synchronization. These must support multiple vendor equipment types and integrate with Business Support Systems (BSS).
- One service design across multiple technologies - The OSS must seamlessly work with mixed multi-technology Ethernet service placement. No matter what the access technology —Fiber, DSL or Wireless— the delivery of service must look and behave the same to the end user.
- Managing and Offering Differentiated Services - Ethernet is the bedrock of many new data services offerings; getting the quality right is critical to the revenue-generating services riding on them. Policing capacity requires a 360 view of systems and data. Sharing of data across groups is essential – be it planners, customer services or operations. With an integrated OSS and BSS the whole organization is able to share data more effectively and efficiently.
- Right size and plan - Historically in many industries, like manufacturing and retail, it has been demonstrated that being able to right size and plan your supply chain is critical to being successful and profitable. The same transformation is now happening in the telecommunication sector. Behaving reactively and operating in silos is no longer an option for telecommunications – and OSS needs to be able to support optimized operations.
Benefits
Arguably the greatest motivation for implementing the described approach to OSS is to meet the specific challenges associated with provisioning and managing Ethernet services, as described above.
But another major motivation for introducing an OSS approach as described in this whitepaper is that it directly helps a service provider control Capital Expenditure (CapEx) on new network equipment. By managing the placement of service across the network, it is possible to control service and placement onto the network according to the available resource on the network. Optimization of the services once placed also permits the best use of the network resources according to a defined best use policy. Further, trending analysis allows the service provider to predict when capital purchases of new devices will be required to support the current service take-up rate. Understanding this permits devices to be purchased in a more controlled manner that best suits the service provider.
Conclusions
In conclusion, Ethernet services offer significant benefits to the end customer and financial benefits to a service provider. It is possible to specify the expected level of service that a customer will receive over the lifetime of an Ethernet service and the point at which that service will be delivered. This provides an enormous advantage to the end user, but in order to do this the service provider must ensure they are able to build a network that is CoS aware.
The only way to ensure this is through the deployment of an OSS solution that defines a CoS model that can then be used to plan, trend and optimize network resources. The OSS provides Admission Control that is driven by CoS parameters and available resource capacity.
If you are thinking of running an Ethernet network and wanting to differentiate Ethernet services, then new challenges must be met. Only an OSS that can address those challenges will enable service providers to reap the full promise of Ethernet.
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