PDF of this tutorialThe well-established PSTN is a multibillion-dollar infrastructure responsible for keeping the world’s communications moving, but it faces serious limitations in the Internet economy:
- It is expensive, which limits innovative new entrants to the market.
- It is proprietary, which makes integrating external applications such as billing, customer service, end-user services, and system maintenance a difficult, expensive, and time-consuming task.
- It is difficult and resource-intensive to manage, with each location usually requiring a separate operations staff.
- It does not support Internet protocol (IP)–based products, multimedia, content delivery, or emerging technologies that are best offered in a converged network.
- Each communications industry segment is attempting to reinvent itself as a total communications provider. With legacy systems and applications, it is difficult for voice carriers to add cable TV or other data services without building a separate, stand-alone system for it. These reduce operational efficiency and create customer-service issues by not being seamless to the customer.
- On-line billing and real-time reporting over the Web are desirable and operationally efficient, but legacy systems lack the inherent capability to provide them.
Enter the Internet and scores of new technology entrants into the converged voice and data marketplace. New players include softswitch controllers that provide instructions to hardware devices. Protocol providers sell preconfigured code to communicate specific languages such as H.323 for multimedia, media gateway control protocol (MGCP) for IP switching, and SS7 for global out-of-band signaling. In addition, dozens of customer relationship management applications, billing packages, service-creation tools, and other applications now exist that can be acquired and integrated into a full solution.
While the growing demand for new technology is strong as consumers and businesses turn to the Internet for an increasing number of daily uses, purchasing these products on a piecemeal basis in order to integrate the Internet into the voice network constitutes just another legacy purchase. Legacy integration, unfortunately, yields a set of discrete systems to manage and a result that is not seamless to the user, operations staff, or customer service.
In Internet time, speed to market is critical. Technologies are developing and being introduced too rapidly to justify a one-to-three-year integration effort merely to add a few new components. By the time the integration is complete, there will be another, newer set of components to integrate. The legacy model, either in technology or business, is not an effective way to thrive in the new economy.
At the pace technology changes, a company cannot afford to commit exclusively to any particular proprietary or standard protocols. While IP is leading the trend now, in five years it is likely to be light or sound wave protocols that have not even been developed. The trick to making all of this work is to leverage the existing infrastructure and integrate the future seamlessly while maintaining an operating model that is efficient, effective, and reduces cost as much as possible.
So, how do new entrants with no technology or incumbents with multibillion-dollar switched networks, seize the forefront of convergence and the power of the Internet? They choose a future-proof Internet infrastructure capable of communicating with proprietary legacy equipment and supporting the protocols to communicate with new devices as they are introduced into the market. Wrapped around that infrastructure must be fully integrated, real-time billing, capable of flat-rate or transaction-based calculation; a flexible and real-time reporting environment; tools for operation people to monitor, maintain, and provision service; and an environment capable of scaling to meet the needs of even the largest global enterprise. Finally, it should all be managed over the Internet, allowing both end-users and operations staff access in the simplest and most efficient manner, through any standard browser.
