DSL Provisioning Still an Enigma
By Evan Blackwell
from the May 21, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
Bring up the words "provisioning" and "deployments" with just about anybody in the DSL market, and you'll quickly hear the same mantra over and over again. "Things are getting better," they'll repeat, sometimes it seems with their eyes closed while tapping their heels together three times.
That optimism seems to have a more serious foundation now because of a new generation of software and equipment aimed at curing DSL provisioning problems, whether they be qualifying millions of existing copper phone lines or setting customers up with the exact services they want.
Peter Jarich, the director of broadband research at The Strategis Group, says the hottest segment of DSL quickly has become the companies working behind the scenes in the back office. "We've seen so much more technology development lately in the OSS space," Jarich said. "There's no question that's its become much more important."
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Qualified for Cable
Cable always has been a step ahead of DSL in a number of respects, and areas related to service provisioning are a good example.
The cable market has been working on cable modem provisioning issues for some time under the auspices of the industry R&D consortium Cable Television Laboratories Inc.
It's been almost a year since CableLabs launched its Go2Broadband project, a Web portal that functions as an industry-wide service locater for the cable industry. Since it launched last June 30, the Go2Broadband service has been helping to speed up broadband provisioning by giving cable operators and retailers updated data on the serviceability of homes that want to receive cable modem services.
While Go2Broadband doesn't perform any of the actual provisioning tasks for the cable operators, it allows information to easily flow back and forth from the customers, and on to the operators themselves. "Does it ease provisioning? You bet it does," says J.P. Singh, director of e-commerce for CableLabs. "Now, the flow of information to set up cable service goes very smoothly between the cable operators and the retail teams selling the service."
The Go2Broadband site functions as an intermediary between the cable operators and the retailers/customers, quickly passing updated service availability and pricing information between retailers and cable operators. The service can handle thousands of messages simultaneously in real time, CableLabs says.
The process starts at the front end created on the Web sites of such Go2Broadband affiliates as Motorola, cable modem service Road Runner and modem vendor Com 21, where customers can inquire about broadband service availability. After the customer enters an address, the request is processed by Go2Broadband and finds the cable operator that services the area, along with the products offered. Should a customer decide to order that service, they fill out a new order screen and the information is sent to the provider to begin the deployment process.
Singh says CableLabs has gotten positive response from equipment affiliates and the operators and that traffic numbers on the Go2Broadband portal continue rising monthly. "We're now handling about 120,000 queries per month," Singh says. "The feedback is right there in the numbers."
-- E.B.
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That importance has been underlined by the continuing troubles of competitive DSL providers and the widely reported problems the incumbent RBOCs also have faced in deploying service.
BroadJump Inc., the Austin, Texas-based OSS software provider, believes its Virtual Truck line of provisioning software addresses the key issues plaguing broadband carriers. BroadJump has made some noise over the last year, forging partnerships with the likes of SBC Communications, BellSouth and Sprint; as well as expanding its relationship with Time Warner Cable.
BroadJump says its software handles the entire service set-up procedure, from qualifying lines and arranging the high-speed connection, to managing the account once it's installed. The Virtual Truck Qualifier and Virtual Truck Installer are the first two pieces of the puzzle, cutting the costs of truck rolls that otherwise would be needed to get lines tested, and meshing with the current ILEC push for customer self-installs.
Virtual Truck is a Web-based CD ROM co-branded by customers like SBC, then used to streamline the process by first running diagnostics on a subscriber's computer for such elements as processor speed, network adapters, available hard disk space and operating systems to ensure the customer is ready for service. Then, Virtual Truck can be used as a self-install tool to set up service.
In the not too distant past, the larger DSL carriers were dependant on in-house technology and records to provision service. The results weren't acceptable. "They realize now that it's a far better situation to leverage the products from a vendor like BroadJump," said Kim McClanahan, BroadJump's CEO.
Other vendors also have scored major deals in the qualification/provisioning area recently, as market pressures for faster, more reliable deployments have forced the large service providers to look for more efficiency in the back office. Line test solutions provider Teradyne won a contract with Verizon Communications in April, while network testing company Spirent Communications announced that Qwest Communications would be using its TestDSL suite.
In the case of Teradyne, it won the Verizon deal after showing strong results in the lab during tests of its Celerity loop management product to detect exchange splitters and load coils on phone lines. Celerity uses automated procedures and can test thousands of lines a day, a significant step forward from the days of Verizon manually sifting through inaccurate load coil records.
Spirent's TestDSL came from Hekimian, the service assurance equipment company that Spirent purchased last year. The TestDSL product now being used by Qwest includes the CopperMax test systems, a family of Hekimian products that also try to cut down on truck rolls with more accuracy than older manual procedures. CopperMax performs both narrowband measurements (load coil detection, loop length) and more extensive wideband measurements like spectral/interference analysis and wideband noise and tone testing. Qwest, which is trying to pursue an aggressive DSL deployment strategy, says the line coverage and scalability of TestDSL should allow for much quicker responses to customer demand.
Jarich says the current push for customer self-installs has been a key for the DSL sector by enabling some quicker deployments. But like many other pieces of the DSL puzzle that's been created, the technology hasn't been flawless.
"On one hand, about one-third of the people still need a truck roll," Jarich says. "Then another one-third says they need a truck roll and another visit. You can't survive strictly on the self-install technology out today, but it is getting better."
Once the broadband connection actually reaches the customer, the fight is only half won. The more important half, as most would argue, comes in maintaining the customer relationship and generating profits and revenues. That comes in the form of value-added services, which many vendors are trying to enable.
Earlier this month at the Networld+Interop spring convention in Las Vegas, Silicon Valley startup P-Cube revealed its broadband strategy and initial products. The company's framework for both its products and plans are called IP Service Engineering, and the focus is on creating and managing new services to go with all the broadband traffic.
P-Cube Service Engine 1000 and Service Management Platform forms a provisioning framework that lets service providers view all applications and subscriber traffic on the network, then make decisions about differentiated service packages.
"What we enable for ISPs is the ability to take control of their infrastructure in conjunction with the services that customers care about," says Yuval Shahar, a co-founder and CEO of P-Cube. "A year ago, this was a cool idea. Today, it's about survival."
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