SDPs Fail to Deliver on Open Network Creation Nirvana

Lack of Interoperability Is Gating Factor to Telco 2.0 Vision

Meanwhile, those operators that have decided to invest in new SDPs find themselves with any number of disparate options. “We’re seeing a complete paradigm shift of the network from a dedicated to a shared resource that spans geographies and runs multiservices — from network-linked services to third-party content, and from dumb to intelligent devices,” said Ty Wang, senior director of product management for the voice, mobility and communication platform at Oracle Communications. “To make the most of it requires the widespread adoption of one standards-based platform for an SDP, because otherwise nothing can talk to each other efficiently. But standardization is not happening.”

Laying the Foundation

So what needs to happen, exactly, to get the SDP framework where it needs to be? As with any house, it starts with putting a foundation in place.

In the past, as anyone who lets the word “telecom” pass their lips more than once a year knows, services were very tightly coupled to the network — the network was the service.

“Now, with the diversity of services that operators want to enable, the network should be just connectivity and services don't originate there,” said Mewada. “They need to abstract control of services from the network. Right now if you want to make a new bundle it still takes six months or more to intro a new service because they are still so tightly coupled. And meanwhile, you need to expose those services to users so that they themselves can quickly create bundles by mixing and matching.”

Ravishankar noted that the network continually is transitioning, so the solution can’t be hard-coded, but rather should exist as software. “You cannot build an external mediation box and just change it accordingly, because you would be changing it all the time,” he said. “You need flexible, integral and internal mediation that interacts with a number of elements, and you can't tie it to one application. So you have to go into the control layer and use service mediation and brokering as an extension to service routing, and providing that as a way to enable flexible service generation.”

He added: “An SDP is a service brokering and mediation layer, essentially, that sits next to routing/control layer. It takes many forms, but ultimately SDPs have to be reusable and have flexibility in programming.”

The other piece of the foundation is the aforementioned creation of external standards. “IP platform providers, vendors, integrators and everyone else needs to agree on how they'll be talking together, whether that’s XML, or whatever,” continued Mewada.

It becomes a bigger issue in a mobile environment. “A lot of problems we are seeing today are driven because of the roaming situation,” said Ravishankar. “Roaming makes the network one big global network. Any time a service is roamed, it's done by a switch. As networks are continually transitioning, you have a problem because carriers all have disparate technical issues.”

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