REACHING OUT FOR OPTIMIZATION

With every new customer or with each one lost comes an incremental change in demand that over time will require network tweaking. Likewise, every enactment of Moore's Law, as well as every inevitable entropic breakdown in control, results in the need for a little grooming, if not a complete makeover. From the board level to the Board level, companies and the networks they operate require persistent self-examination in order to deliver the best return on investment.

Given that most service providers now maintain two networks — their legacy, circuit-switched networks and the next generation packet networks to which they are slowly transitioning — the challenge of optimizing those networks has grown exponentially. It also is a given that most service providers have less people to meet that challenge.

“People are so up to their rear ends in alligators, they can't address this issue. They are doing the best they can, but we know they're not doing enough,” said Dennis Brian, president of Brighton Communications, a small consultative firm started by two facilities experts who learned the importance of good network hygiene while employed as network planners for BellSouth.

Even when a provider has time to turn its attention to network optimization, where does it start? Is there a burning need to optimize bandwidth? It depends. Though there's probably not a need for it on long-haul facilities where thousands of miles of fiber lie dormant, that need certainly penetrates the metro route where bottlenecks abound.

Should a service provider start with its work force? Not if its idea of work force optimization stops at work force reduction. However, providing the work force with better tools would be a good start.

But do providers start there or with process automation, better trouble ticket and dispatch systems, more remote testing systems or better traffic analysis? Or should they invest in equipment that provides more port density, occupies less floor space, less shelf space or uses less power? Should they accelerate convergence, invest in centralized element management and configuration or reward vendors that reduce the mean-time-to-repair and the failure rate? Should they take the time to groom their legacy networks or concentrate on the efficient buildout of their next generation network? How about some new network planning software? Should they include self-provisioning, self-management and self-service or design the network to promote managed services?

The obvious answer to all of the above is “yes.” But how?

Brian says don't sweat the small stuff. He and partner Allan Martin, along with as many contracted ex-telco engineers as needed for a particular project, focus on what they see as the most neglected portion of the network: the legacy circuit-switched infrastructure. “You see all kinds of attention on the next generation network, but you don't see enough attention being paid to the largest embedded asset the service provider has,” Martin said.

And there's money in those assets, he added. Brighton's main service offering, ImmeDEOT Switched Access Trunk Optimization, has been used by interexchange carriers and local exchange carriers to find the optimum balance of the direct trunks and access tandem trunks that connect them. The company claims up to 25% savings in access charges. The solution — part process, part software — was created for a project with BellSouth that examined the Bell company's interconnections with 25 different IXCs.

ImmeDEOT also can be used to optimize switching equipment, point-of-presence consolidation and tandem switch consolidation. So far, despite the software tools Brighton created for trunk engineering, tariff analysis and other functions, the process of access trunk optimization remains just that — a process. Networks are too diverse and proprietary to create an off-the-shelf optimization tool that can do the whole job. And the job never ends, Brian said. “Carriers should make an effort to do a special study of their network every two to three years.”

Unfortunate, but true. Despite advances in technologies that promise more intelligent, network-aware elements, more auto-discovery and more automated processes — thereby less human and error-prone — the results of even the best optimization project tends to break down over time. It's the same way a teen-ager's room can be immaculate on Monday and a disaster zone by Friday; misconfigured ports and unused circuits accumulate as fast as mismatched socks. Pretty soon, the network inventory database is out of whack and integrity starts to break down.

“In order to do a proper job, we have to know what a carrier has, and it turns out that they don't always know what they have,” Brian said.

Therein lies the key to network optimization: No matter which network optimization path one takes, it all boils down to inventory and inventory's more mature older brother, resource management.

“It's all terribly unglamorous,” said Jay Borden, president and CEO of Granite Systems, a New Hampshire-based provider of resource management solutions. It's so unglamorous in fact that the word “inventory” is difficult to find in the company's promotional materials. Granite has expanded its concept of inventory, as well as the breadth of solutions it offers, based on that concept.

“Years ago, the core of our product set was network inventory and tracking what you have. Now, it is tracking the processes interacting with what you have and driving them in an automated fashion,” Borden said.

If inventory is the foundation of optimization, its extension to overall resource management is at the heart of it. According to Borden, resource management extends correct data automatically to all other elements and people in the network, turning that data into useful information carriers can use to support growing transaction volumes, new services, the new equipment needed to support them, and the overall pace of change in the network.

He agreed that many network providers still have a pretty sketchy handle on the assets in their networks and added that attempts to optimize, plan or engineer networks can only fall short of expectations with that kind of network view. “I used to have a fascination with network simulation software where you could simulate an entire network with traffic running through all kinds of scenarios. It was all very cool,” Borden said. “But if you really only know where 60% to 70% of your network is, what does that kind of analysis really do for you?”

Borden also discounts recent chatter about better intelligence in network elements leading to less reliance on inventory systems and leading to the self-optimizing network.

“There is no amount of added intelligence in the network that will obviate the need for centralized configuration management and configuration planning,” Borden said. “I don't think any serious commentator can maintain such a thing.”

He did say that added intelligence and more openness in the element management layer will help network providers automate the feedback and reconciliation loops within their business processes. “That's where you get the huge gains in network integrity needed to support a highly optimized network,” Borden added.

Whereas Brighton uses mostly process to streamline a carrier's circuit switched infrastructure, Elk Grove Village, Ill.-based NetAdvantage is a software solutions provider focused on the planning process for the Sonet and optical layers of the network.

George Fischer, director of optical network products for NetAdvantage, agreed with Borden on the importance of inventory in maintaining optimum return on network investment. “You can only [work with] what you know,” Fischer said.

The company did work last year for Sprint, Tellabs, Redback Networks and satellite network provider Intellsat. NetAdvantage is a division of Denver-based Cox Associates Consulting, which specializes in network optimization tools for telecom companies.

Fischer, Brian and others say that Bell companies can realize the biggest benefit to the products and services they offer, but despite the economic need to drive cost out of the network, they say the Bells aren't knocking down their doors — yet.

“They lean on their vendors to collectively optimize the network,” Fischer said.

Like inventory, hardware optimization is an ongoing and underlying process in streamlining the network. It is driven in part by carrier demand, but also by the natural competitive process, which according to Fischer is a double-edged sword.

“Vendors want to optimize their product as a way to differentiate themselves from competitors, but as a result their customers need to buy less product,” Fischer said.

The growth in network technologies and the continual optimization efforts of hardware vendors can make life difficult for companies like NetAdvantage. Such companies develop software along the lines of the network simulation solutions Borden discussed, but they develop that software for network planners and engineers. “We model the network down to the card level, for different vendors with different granularities and capabilities, but modeling how equipment performs and acts in the network realistically is our biggest challenge,” Fischer said.

He added that every challenge in modeling the network makes it that much easier for network planners to do their job. Fischer said NetAdvantage software tools have saved service providers up to 25% when using it to design new metropolitan Sonet buildouts. Starting with the premise that network optimization starts with sound network planning, NetAdvantage also offers planning tools for optical layer mesh topology, wireless backhaul, dark fiber, customer data mining, predictive modeling, demand forecasting and capacity planning.

The truth is that network optimization uses a shotgun start. It starts everywhere and with every network player. The makers of chips and semiconductors, the smallest to the largest equipment manufacturers, software and applications developers, managers of processes, and authors of protocols and standards all have a hand in network optimization. It is one telecom concept that will never go out of style.