IP services now!

A business customer calls the ISP arm of its carrier, wanting to set up an Internet protocol videoconference in 30 days. The problem is, it takes 40 days to provision the service. The customer is incredulous, then disgusted and angry. The carrier has lost not only revenue but perhaps the customer as well.

Provisioning IP services is similar to provisioning telephony services in that neither is automated or integrated, and both are highly manual. But they are different in terms of customer expectations. Stephen Murray, new service development manager at Island Telecom Advanced Solutions, a subsidiary of Canadian carrier Island Telecom, says, "The past model of provisioning was that customers got what they got, and that was it. The IP space has given the customer choice.

[Service providers] should be provisioning the services the way the customer wants them, when they want them."

The provisioning of IP services also suffers from a lack of standardization - Web hosting may be provisioned one way, e-mail another, and so forth. This in turn means a lot of up-front customization.

"If [service providers] want to offer something new, the initial setup requires a lot of customization and integration before it can be offered and automatically provisioned," says Jennifer Kula, an applications service provider analyst at TeleChoice.

Customers wanting IP services are in a particular hurry, too. Kula says, "Most people signing up for any kind of IP service expect it to be up and running quickly. They need fast service. Especially for an e-commerce company, the faster they get up and running, the sooner the money will come in."

In response to this pressure from its IP customers, ITAS is in the last stages of completely renovating the way it provisions IP services. Until a few months ago, all the accounting, billing and provisioning was outsourced to Canada Bell. With delays of up to six weeks in provisioning new services and with receivables running three months behind, ITAS decided to bring all these processes in-house. "The ISP business has such skinny margins. If you don't manage tightly, you're destined for failure," Murray says.

Island Tel used Bridgewater Systems' WideSpan Service Controller, integrated with TotalBill, for what Murray calls the "repatriation" of the provisioning process. It took only two days to transfer the data, but afterwards, there was "a fair amount of work," Murray says.

Sorting out the different customer classes was one big problem. So was separating the provincial and federal Canadian taxes, which were lumped together in bills by Bell Canada. The ability to create reports of business performance indicators such as number of customers, number of new customers, churn and revenue was another need.

Bridgewater was essential to solving each problem, and Murray was particularly pleased that Island Tel was able to do some of the work. "Bridgewater has been open to letting us facilitate our own business needs," he says.

Dave Curley, vice president of marketing at Bridgewater Systems says, "Carriers are having trouble keeping up with growth in the basic entry-level package of services [e-mail, Internet access, news, etc.]. As they add users, they add servers and modem pools, which leads to so much complexity that one change must be made to hundreds or thousands of servers. You have to have your name in the e-mail, billing, accounting and all authorization servers."

Any new service creates the same propagation problem. "Drag in bandwidth issues," Curley continues, "and it's almost an adoption curve. When people get used to functionality, they want it bigger, better and faster."

Bridgewater's WideSpan Service Controller is intelligent software that automates the provisioning process by directory-enabling the network. The core directory of the system is, in Bridgewater's terms, a policy engine - a directory of configured service profiles. Service policies at the user, user group or organization level are implemented and enforced based on these configured profiles. A change at the central policy engine/directory is propagated to all elements of the network via lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) queries to the various servers to see if they can provision the specified services (including e-mail, Web hosting, file transfer protocol, news and virtual private networks). All accounting and billing is bi-directional. The WideSpan architecture is open, including Bridgewater's own application programming interfaces and toolkits, to interoperate with custom or multivendor systems.

Since the WideSpan solution was implemented, ITAS' IP receivables delay has been cut in half. The goal is to be just one billing cycle behind.

Bridgewater also gives ITAS direct, quick access to all customer information, so a six-week delay in provisioning a service is a thing of the past. "We can understand customer and usage demands and what is driving that space," Murray says. "We're in better shape than a year ago, that's for sure."

I-Link is an enhanced service provider facing the same messy provisioning problems that ITAS (and everyone else) is facing. The IP telephony firm offers customers its proprietary V-Link technology, which includes enhanced calling, unified messaging, a one-number "follow-me" service, enhanced conference calling, and "Visual V-Link" - Web sites where customers can place service orders. The latest V-Link, version 3.0, will offer even more services, including caller screening and voice identification.

"We're not just using IP as a transport mechanism," says Mark Hewitt, I-Link's senior vice president of business and product development. "Every session is an enhanced service session on the network. The [call] is examined to see if we have to switch over to data or fax. The system application engine would respond to this." Or the system might immediately set up a conference call - whatever is ordered.

I-Link uses "communication engines" to replace gateways to the public network. Each of these engines - PCs with conventional computer telephony boards - handles up to 10 T-1 lines and will be able to manage DS-3 lines by the end of the year. The communication engines include a primary-rate interface, digital signal processor boards with software, and an Internet media control protocol stack. All of this converts public network signals into IP packets - in 15-millisecond frames rather than the conventional 30-millisecond frames. So, Hewitt says, "We cut a lot of delay time in the origination and termination side." The communication engines contain software that can send a fax as packets and demodulate it on the outside of the network.

The I-Link network contains proxy devices that allow conventional H.323 devices such as other gateways or wireless H.323 phones to interact with I-Link's network. The network also contains NetLink, a box that plugs into a customer's Ethernet on one side and connects to I-Link's network by any one of various broadband methods on the other.

Finally, the network offers the V-Link patented application engine, which is "N-plus scalable, highly fault-tolerant and highly distributed," Hewitt says. "This is where the applications reside that know how to collect voice prompts, manage the conference servers and so forth."

However, all of this technology is focused on realizing services, not on provisioning, tracking usage, accounting and billing for them. That's where Abatis Systems comes in.

Abatis' goal is to make IP services as "consumable" as voice services.

Virginia Balcom, director of marketing at Abatis, explains: "Today, if you want to place a voice call, you can `consume' it easily. The types of things companies do over a network aren't as consumable. Abatis wants to make those services as easy and flexible as voice is today."

Abatis' Consumable IP will be based on a three-tiered architecture of devices. The bottom layer is the intelligent enterprise service point, which sits between the customer premises equipment and the carrier. Next is the network services contractor layer, which handles the interface between the network and the service layer. At the top is the service layer. The customer interacts with the carrier at the service layer, ordering services through a Web-based service "portal," which Abatis compares to a retail storefront. Behind that, but also on the service level, is the "wholesale" side, an API that receives all the information from the user to set up the desired service, sends it to the contractor layer and from there down to the service point. The pieces of the tier can be deployed as needed, starting with the service point.

"Today when you sell a data service, you set up a [permanent virtual circuit] between the CPE and the network, and you have to do all the testing," Balcom says. "What if you put a service point right out there with the underlying link? With one rollout, you'd be able to turn up IP services from a central system and not have to roll anything out again. With intelligence between the customer and the network, the underlying network pieces are already set up."

The enterprise service point is that intelligence, which is why I-Link agreed in September to begin a thorough lab evaluation of it. According to Balcom, the service point can control quality of service (QOS), measure service and differentiate between voice, video and data.

Hewitt explains what I-Link is expecting from the service point: "To maintain the QOS the customer expects and to account for it. To take a particular application and [identify] the characteristics of the network it needs to perform, plus accounting and tracking functions. This is huge."

The goal of all of this is not simply to please customers with on-demand provisioning, although that's certainly part of it. The real goal is to make it possible for IP customers to use the Net to obtain services on demand.

Murray is working on an initiative called "Intermedia Cast," where the aim is "to take you to a place where information is truly interactive." He likens it to a Net version of a theme park.

"Why isn't this happening on the Web?" Murray asks. "There should be more opportunities for people to tap into this as bandwidth increases."

Balcom points out that the opportunities for on-demand videoconferencing, application hosting, Web hosting, software rental, even information technology department hosting far outweigh those for providing bandwidth, which is becoming a simple - and ever cheaper - commodity.

"It could be as simple as an application services provider putting up SAP on a server and selling the service, including the use of the software, data security, and backup," Balcom says. "What's new is that instead of putting the software on [the customer's] server, he can access it."

Balcom cites CIMI Corp.'s forecast of a $300 billion market over the next 10 years for just this type of "consumable IP," including those Balcom calls AYUTOS - as-yet-unthought-of services.

Getting the knack of provisioning IP services on demand seems like a small price to pay in order to grab a piece of that $300 billion.