Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 3

	This Month's Issue:
	Unlocking the Power of Web 2.0

Managed Online Services: Responding to Emerging Content and Apps

By Andrew McDonald and Jim Guillet

The allure of new revenues from a managed digital television service offering hit its stride in 2004 when the world's leading service providers began making decisions about the requisite service delivery architecture for IPTV. The technical challenges of IPTV were significant: the service requires a cost-effective architecture that delivers high subscriber scale, high bandwidth throughput per-subscriber and high concurrency. Furthermore, IPTV is a "managed" service due to the strict quality of service requirements needed to deliver a high quality and "always on" experience to the mass market of TV-savvy consumers. The new requirements of IPTV service delivery were extensive and drove a new network architecture.

The evolved network architecture now needed to provide distributed, fine-grain policy enforcement with centralized policy control to deliver multiple services to subscribers, including managed services such as IPTV and voice as well as unmanaged services such as High Speed Internet (HSI) access. In addition, the architecture ideally would utilize all parts of the network to deliver and enforce policy end-to-end.

Now, with IPTV architecture decided, the priorities of service providers is shifting to maximizing the return on investment of their new, strategic residential triple play foundation. Specifically, attention is shifting to new, innovative solutions that exploit the new network's ability to create new services and business models that go beyond the initial, mass market requirements of triple play.

One such challenge is emerging broadband applications and content delivered "over the top" (OTT) of consumers' Internet access service. Service Providers are seeking a positive, value-centric approach to embrace OTT as an opportunity. Specifically, they are looking for an architecture that will enable deep packet inspection (DPI) as well as even more fine-grain application assurance (AA) within the triple play network that will allow operators to broaden their triple play portfolio with a suite of complementary and managed on-line services. This allows service providers to position themselves in the value chain as facilitators of highly-personalized, managed and unmanaged services that enable consumers, content owners, application owners, advertisers - and other key actors in the value chain - to choose the quality of experience they want for the content they care about and at a price they are prepared to pay.

Triple Play Service Definitions and Delivery Architectures

A good place to begin a discussion on services and supporting delivery architectures is with the current residential triple play portfolio as defined at the IP service edge. Existing triple

as the demand for higher average bandwidth grows, the over-subscription factor defined at the IP service edge for the HSI service definition is stressed.

play service definitions can be positioned according to their average bandwidth per subscriber and whether the service is managed or not. IPTV, for example, is a managed service with quality of service, high sustained bandwidth per subscriber and high concurrency. High Speed Internet (HSI) access service, by comparison, is unmanaged in the sense that the service definition offers "best effort" access to a pool of bandwidth shared amongst the Internet community. Being highly over-subscribed, the average bandwidth per subscriber for HSI is typically in the 10 to 100 kb/s range. Finally, VoIP service refers to the service provider's own broadband digital voice offering and is a managed service with low average bandwidth per subscriber.

Viewed from the IP service edge, all three service definitions are different, with IPTV being the most difficult to deliver. Simply put, these differences and IPTV's new requirements drove service providers to choose a new service delivery architecture for their triple play networks. Now, a few years after deciding upon a new architecture, video is again creating another challenge: this time for video delivered over-the-top of a consumer's HSI access service. The challenge with the growing OTT phenomena is its impact on the HSI service definition, the engineering rules embedded in the underlying network and the corresponding affect both have on the consumer experience.

HSI service delivery was the driving force behind first-generation broadband networks deployments that begin in the late 1990s. The legacy HSI service delivery network is comprised of access, aggregation and service edge elements. From a consumer perspective, applications with bursty traffic patterns such as email and general web browsing deliver an experience largely defined by the broadband access technology. Indeed, operators have traditionally marketed their

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