IPDR.org calls for IPTV initiative

With carriers working the bugs out of IPTV through trials and controlled rollouts, the Internet Protocol Detail Record Organization (IPDR.org) is calling for an industrywide forum to address accounting and settlement issues for the service.

The group will lead a forum Feb. 22 to 24 in San Jose hosted by Cisco Systems. The forum will be open to telephony service providers, broadband and cable providers, entertainment content partners and vendors, and any other parties interested in driving accounting and settlement standards for IPTV services.

“With the influx of more complex services, traditional usage accounting formats such as EMI and AMA are just not going to be able to accommodate,” said Kelly Anderson, president and chief operating officer of IPDR.org.

Though some carriers are in production with IPTV, they are still in a test environment in the back office, she said. “One of the things we are trying to drive in this meeting is their long-term OSS strategies,” Anderson said.

IPDR.org also will drive its IPDR Streaming Protocol (IPDR/SP), which recently gained ANSI certification for trial use as a national standard and has been adopted by at least one major U.S. carrier for IPTV. Because the protocol was created to extract and export usage data from many network elements, Cox Communications, has used it to manage capacity and for traffic analysis.

At its kickoff meeting, IPDR.org hopes to document requirements for network usage accounting, discuss accounting mechanisms for IPTV and create a task force of leaders and contributors. IPDR/SP was the brainchild of start-up Xacct Technologies, which contributed its Common Reliable Accounting for Network Elements technology to IPDR.org in June 2003. Amdocs acquired Xacct in February 2004 for $29.5 million.

Amdocs is a charter member of IPDR.org, along with BSG Clearing Solutions, Cisco, HP, Narus, Rogers Wireless, Sprint and VeriSign.

“Standards in a flexible and extensible protocol like IPDR can be very helpful,” said Mike Couture, vice president of marketing at Amdocs. “Any time you can facilitate faster, lower-cost integration and time to market, it's a positive thing.”