TR-069 and beyond

Two years ago the DSL Forum released a remote management specification that gives service providers greater visibility into and control over home networking services. With an eye toward reducing the cost of service activation and support while making home gateways easier to install, the DSL Forum created a Technical Report commonly referred to as TR-069. TR-069 represents a major step forward in the evolution of broadband because it standardizes the way home network devices are provisioned, diagnosed, fixed and upgraded. But more work remains if true end-to-end-service management is to become a common reality.

Since TR-069’s ratification, changing market dynamics continue to impact the way service providers conduct business. A single high-speed data service is no longer a viable, long-term path to retain market share or grow revenue. Prices of core data services—and the associated margins—are declining steeply, and market saturation of basic broadband is on the horizon. To remain competitive, carriers are expanding into new video and content services, going after video franchises, bundling entertainment packages, and competing head-to-head with traditional cable operators to attract and retain new customers.

In this next-generation environment, a variety of new devices—set-top boxes (STBs), media servers and voice terminals—reside behind the gateway in the customer premises, extending the traditional demarcation point beyond the modem/router and increasing the complexity associated with managing new services. To ensure a reliable (and rewarding) customer experience, operators must have end-to-end service visibility that spans from the provider’s back-end into the consumer home.

Extending remote management capabilities

Although initially focused on high-speed data, the TR-069 protocol was designed to be well-suited for the multiple challenges of the digital home environment. Recently, additional specifications that extend TR-069’s capabilities have been ratified, providing the first steps toward the “holy grail” of end-to-end service management and suggesting the long-term impact that TR-069 will have on the market. These specifications include:

• TR-098 which extends the initial gateway management capabilities to encompass service-oriented quality of service (QoS) policies. This helps operators ensure that certain applications—such as a voice call, which needs to be protected from the effects of other network traffic—will get priority in and out of the home.
• TR-106 which provides the template for extending TR-069 remote management to other digital home devices.
• TR-111 which makes it easier for an auto-configuration server (ACS) to interact with home-based devices that live behind a NAT router.
• TR-104 which defines parameters for a TR-069-managed VoIP analog terminal adaptor (ATA) to enable operators to manage their new voice offerings.

While these are encouraging first steps, much work remains. For the operator, managing consumer-facing devices is new territory—especially devices that consumers may find both more interesting and more challenging than a DSL modem. This means providers must ensure that new services do not cause exponential operational expenses, or worse, customer churn.

Several draft protocols, or Working Texts (WTs), are being considered to address these challenges and extend TR-069 to its full potential. These include:

• WT-135 which enables TR-069-based remote management of STBs, regardless of whether the video is traditional broadcasting, satellite or emerging IP video.
• WT-140 which enables operators to remotely provision and manage content storage systems that store and back up any variety of user- or provider-supplied A/V content, such as digital media servers or personal video recorders (PVRs).
• WT-143 which provides a way for an ACS to initiate real-world throughput tests to give the service provider a view of what the user would actually experience before a service is rolled out.

Additional extensions to TR-069-based remote management capabilities for gateways and end devices should eventually provide the means to configure or interrogate MoCA, HomePlug A/V and a variety of other interfaces, making it possible for providers to make better use of new home distribution technologies optimized for large-bandwidth content services.

Once all elements of the digital home can be managed, providers will have the full visibility necessary to offer in-home service level agreements (SLAs) or transparent zero-touch service provisioning—two of key capabilities providers will use to differentiate themselves from competitors in the market.

All systems working together

Another critical step towards achieving a true end-to-end service view is extending the management reach deeper into the back-end of the network—and even the networks of a provider’s partners. Delivering IP video, for example, does not merely involve flipping the bits on a device in the consumer’s home. Instead, it entails a complex set of configurations, policies, streams, etc., defined and packaged by the provider and its partners, and delivered as a customized service to the subscriber. For example, information from an order management system can impact the exact configuration appropriate for a particular device. Events from a billing system might enable or disable certain features of a device. Information about the state of a device might be relevant for a network monitoring application. Some of these systems may be under the control of a provider’s partners, especially if the consumer has subscribed to a third-party service that requires some device re-configuration for delivery. In an environment in which the services delivered depend on the devices in the home being tightly integrated with systems in the back-end, it is critical to define all the various ways in which the device management platform connects those two domains.

Two additional draft documents, WT-131 and WT-132, define the interfaces necessary for an ACS to enable these scenarios. Connecting the entity which has control over specific devices with the entities that have control over back-end systems, enables them all to operate in concert and deliver the best experience to the subscriber.

Success depends on industry commitment

TR-069 is a landmark industry standard that has enjoyed widespread endorsement from service providers for its ability to help streamline the provisioning and ongoing management of high-speed data services. However, as next-generation services become more important, the management stakes will increase. Service providers will require a deeper reach into the customer home, improved integration with back-end systems and the ability to deploy broadband services across a range of access networks.

Continued investment in the TR-069 family of specifications is critical to enable these extended capabilities, and to ensure new services can be deployed profitably. And as work continues, the entire industry must rise to the occasion. Providers must use industry standards such as TR-069 to deploy new services—and must demand that their vendors deliver standards-based solutions that support those efforts.

Finally, those involved in the standards work itself need to resist the temptation to name TR-069 “a success” and move on. This means pushing ahead with current and upcoming work that supports end-to-end service delivery for the entire mix of next-generation broadband offerings.

Heather Kirksey is a member of the DSL Forum’s Board of Directors and co-chair of the DSL Home-Technical Working Group. At Motive, Inc., she directs the strategy and execution of the company’s device management and digital home standards initiatives.