SDPs Fail to Deliver on Open Network Creation Nirvana

Lack of Interoperability Is Gating Factor to Telco 2.0 Vision

The other problem that needs to be resolved is one of mindset. “Incumbents have a lot to lose and so will talk about open interfaces, but won't cooperate,” said Craig Lee, vice president of marketing and business development at Ortiva Wireless. “You might have a standard in place, but lots of people build specific proprietary extensions. There are good intentions at the standards bodies, but companies are trying to protect themselves. Juniper managing a Cisco router? I don't see that happening easily because they have too much to lose. Operators will have to start requiring that capability within their own networks.”

Raising the Roof

So what’s a service-hungry carrier to do? Some vendors are taking matters into their own hands.

“Companies must live with the fact that the world has changed and that the traditional mindset isn't going to fly,” said Lee. “You'll run into a series of issue in integration and management of services and interop along the way, with disparate elements delivering disparate services, all of which has to play nicely in the back office. Having the perfect network will eliminate these issues, but since we’re not there, there are other approaches.”

For instance, Ortiva specializes in helping service providers deliver optimized streaming video to customers. “The main concern is not just the ability to make video look good — it's the ability to interact with all the components and get them to work together,” explained Lee. “Customers deploy custom technology — say, something that allows users to shop, download and pay for ringtones. But that system is totally incapable of doing the same for video, because there was no forethought about what the other apps would be and how they would integrate into the OSS and network management and billing.” Ortiva builds extensions to other service components in order to make it seem seamless to the end user.

RealNetworks Inc.’s Analisa Roberts, senior director of marketing planning and analysis, said her company is placing a big focus on solving the roaming issue. “We’ve created a multitenant and multiservice platform for content and service delivery,” she explained. “We took the platform for our most popular service, ringback tones, and added functionality to make it multiservice and [so it would] be able to work with multiple carriers off the platform. So we reduce complexity and take care of the interop and continue to deliver service to end consumers. And now we’re working on how to take those features and make them intercarrier-functioning.”

While there are stop-gap measures, it’s clear the SDP issue eventually will need to be solved more holistically. “With the convergence of WiMAX, LTE, Wi-Fi, and 2G and 3G, we want to get to an any-screen-to-any-screen environment, and operators’ models will change, so a Comcast will deliver content to a customer over a telco’s network. That’s the future,” said Ortiva’s Lee. “There will have to be total separation between what it means to be a carrier and the content and how you want to access it and how to deliver it.

“It will take a very brave, large service provider to be first,” he added.

Movement might be sooner than we think. “There are a lot of things that have to change and evolve to make this successful,” said Mewada. “But most people recognize what needs to be done. I think this year we will start seeing providers anchoring some key services in SDPs, like LBS and VoIP, and messaging — and then start creating service clusters around them.”

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