Becoming a Super ISP in Venezuela

Becoming a Super ISP

SuperCable moving forward to achieve goal in Venezuela

By Javier Espinosa

(Global Telephony) What’s on TV tonight? In Venezuela it just might be the Internet.

SuperCable, one of Venezuela’s largest TV companies, has visions of becoming the country’s Internet service provider (ISP) of choice and considers its strategies to be a step toward offering many services beyond cable television using its existing cable infrastructure.

The company is moving into its new role as a multi-service operator (MSO) at a fast pace considering Venezuela’s sometimes difficult regulatory climate.

Venezuela’s telecom regulator, CONATEL, has been working since its creation in 1991 to promote telecom sector growth. More recently, there has been progress toward drafting and approving modern telecom reforms and regulations, some of which replace pre-existing laws dating back to 1940.

In most developing markets, a new generation of competitive providers is emerging only after deregulation legislation is completed. In Venezuela, however, the market already is being served by companies like SuperCable that have invested in and built advanced network infrastructures in anticipation of deregulation legislation.

Venezuela’s new government wants to increase the use of the Internet, currently in its infancy with approximately 500,000 subscribers. Two percent of the country’s population now is connected to an Internet service. In order to encourage more subscribers, the government is committed to opening the country to as many telco services as possible. The country’s longstanding telephone monopoly expired in November 2000.

Despite the lack of activity in the Internet market thus far, dozens of operators are lining up to launch Internet services and compete with SuperCable. Venezuela’s three rural wireline operators plan to add Internet services to their portfolios, as do all of the country’s private network operators.

But there is one problem for service providers: Because many operators are vying for a substantial share of the market, their success will be based on the ability to enter the market quickly and cost-effectively bundle Internet service with other services, such as cable television or voice telephony, at a price customers can afford.

The challenge might be good news for SuperCable. The company provides subscription cable services to 140,000 subscribers, mostly in Caracas and six other cities, with an optical fiber network already in place. The network was designed from the start to transport high-speed voice, data and video. As such, SuperCable already is prepared to provide a variety of services with marginal additional investments in a short period of time. Forging a New Role as MSO

In 1999, with the availability of affordable technological solutions and the elimination of regulatory limitations on the horizon, SuperCable’s executives seized an opportunity to transform the company into a multiple services operator instead of a multiple system operator for Venezuela and other Latin American countries.

Super Cable gauged how the changes would strain its information technology staff. Realizing the job might take more time with in-house resources, the company decided to outsource the needed expertise for its new Internet infrastructure to consulting engineers.

With the assistance of Hewlett-Packard, SuperCable completed specifications for system components, accomplished installation, and launched the new service to 120 pilot customers in seven months. See the figure

The process moved quickly because a physical infrastructure was in place. SuperCable could leverage its high-bandwidth fiber optic cable connection already laid for cable TV service. SuperCable also made the decision to leverage existing Internet service elements rather than design its own.

For example, to enable Internet navigation services, SuperCable implemented the services through Microsoft Commercial Internet System (MCIS). MCIS is a family of Web server software products that runs on Windows NT and works with the Internet information server. The platform was designed by Microsoft for ISPs and other commercial service providers to help meet the demand for outsourced business applications, while reducing overhead costs associated with Web hosting.

The MCIS platform also will enable SuperCable to add and deploy new services as needed in the future.

“It [MCIS] provided them [Super Cable] with authoring and development tools, resource kit, and MCIS administration and provisioning services (MAPS), which is a framework for signup, provisioning and delegated administration,” says Carlos Colina, an HP technical consultant.

A third element also contribued to SuperCable’s rapid roll-out: turnkey hardware environment.

Following assessment routines developed from previous ISP deployments, HP enterprise server deployments at SuperCable were preceded by a detailed configuration process. Following a strict timeline co-developed with HP for configuring and certifying/testing the application and database servers as well as the network management services, SuperCable’s hardware platform included seven HP NetServers, a 3Com CMTS and Cisco 2924 Catalyst switches. Project software included Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft Cluster Server, Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and HP OpenView OmniBack II for data backup and recovery.

The platform includes several types of redundancy, such as server clustering, RAI-5 and RAI-1 disc redundancy, and hot swap board technology. This level of building was necessary, because if a component fails, it will not interrupt customers’ telephone service.

The “lifeline service,” along with the implementation of automated platform and communication services monitoring using HP OpenView solutions, ensures potential problems can be detected before they affect customer service levels.

To protect customers’ data, SuperCable installed HP OmniBack, a backup tape strategy that enables continuous, parallel backup/restore operations. It enables operations managers to have a centralized console from which they can perform error recovery and diagnostics and network management.

Now that SuperCable has successfully launched Internet service, the next move could involve cable telephony. The rapid conversion of cable to a digital two-way operation -- which would support SuperCable’s pay-per-view and video on demand services while providing high-speed Internet access -- has paved the way for cable telephony.

SuperCable will combine its optical fiber system with two-way design line amplifiers that will support high-speed data traffic without a telephone return.

And the platform SuperCable is implementing for cable modems will provide voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) as well as Internet protocol (IP) telephony using cable modems with phone line capacity.

Javier Espinosa (jespinosa@supercable.com) is the information technology director at SuperCable in Caracas, Venezuela.