SDPs Fail to Deliver on Open Network Creation Nirvana

Lack of Interoperability Is Gating Factor to Telco 2.0 Vision

Everybody seems to be all for creating revenue-generating next-gen services and content, but it sure isn’t easy.

Service delivery platforms (SDPs) hold the promise of making the most of softswitch-based network architecture and IMS cores, allowing carriers to abstract services from the converged underlying transport layer and create reusable components of services — a bit like Lego blocks. The goal is to allow carriers to add on applications more rapidly, and reduce complexity and management requirements. The next step is being able to expose this to partners, so if the Googles of the world want to offer an application that combines the location of a person with a map and directions, they can do that. And the operator can let users control preferences, and access and use policies.

Sounds great on paper; however, being a relatively new kid on the technology block, SDPs suffer from a lack of cross-vendor interoperability and standardization — no two are the same. For carriers, that means it’s a lot harder to get to abstraction Nirvana than it seems on the surface.

Sanjay Mewada, vice president of strategy at OSS vendor NetCracker Technology Corp., likens the evolving service delivery environment to building a house: “Everybody now agrees that a house should look a certain way and have a certain set of furniture, appliances and fixtures,” he explained. “But what we’re looking at today with SDP is the house that's being built for the first time. There are no standardized sizes, treatments, fixtures. You can’t just go to any shop and pick up fittings and expect them to work in the blueprint. But you still have to create a place for services to live. But right now it has to be customized because it’s being built for the first time.”

But that’s not all. The TeleManagement Forum in its musings on SDPs also points out quite rightly that it’s not just a question of getting an SDP to cohabitate nicely with other network elements. The other issue at hand is the move to a content-centric world. With open application development and fixed-mobile convergence there will be application traffic — which the network operator likely will not have created itself — zipping back and forth across organizations, between home and work, even between countries. And, as such, that traffic will roam across telco networks, in some cases needing class of service end-to-end. Add in widgets and snackable content and the need to let the user create his or her own personalized service bundles, and you’re talking about a high-volume, small-duration environment. Thus, in many ways, the billing, mediation and provisioning systems have to reinvent themselves to accommodate micro-payments and manage transactions no matter where they originate.

“When carriers are talking about growing the revenue, it’s hard to justify the capex for IMS and SDPs,” said Ravi Ravishankar, director of product marketing at Tekelec. “So they ask how can I reuse what I have? They’re looking into blending services over the existing infrastructure. Right now there are no IMS subscribers to balance the cost.”

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