Scaleability for the Cash-Strapped

If mixing metaphors is acceptable, you might say that size is in the eye of the beholder when talking about service architectures. There is no doubt that wireless carriers are jumping on the enhanced-services bandwagon. However, the service-architecture approach differs radically depending on the size of carrier you are or, more accurately, the size of your immediate market.

The original premise of intelligent networking suggested that carriers pull enhanced services and adjunct services off of the switch. This would purify the work of the switch, allowing it to do what it does best -- process calls. It further suggested that the services and processes that came off of the switch could be sent to adjunct processors to perform the desired functions. Those functions can range from local number portability to debit services.

Infrastructure Need But now there is a new twist. The budding story in the wireless world is that small, scaleable, open switches are beginning to take hold in the infrastructure of new emerging networks, which represents a reversal of the original premise.

Small wireless service providers have expressed a need to build infrastructure from these switches as opposed to using them only as adjuncts.

"We are being used increasingly by the likes of Airnet and Nokia as base-station controllers and mobile switching centers," said Peter Carlino, director of business development and communications for Summa Four. "These types of environments require significantly more capacity than we have traditionally provided as an adjunct processor."

It is now possible to take a small, scaleable inexpensive switch and apply it directly to infrastructure applications. This approach has found great acceptance with smaller carriers who are traditionally cash-strapped and who have fairly small customer bases when they start out.

"Scaleability and economics are very high on their list -- in particular, in the C-block customer base," Carlino said.

Addressing Scaleability Large-scale switch manufacturers such as Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola and Nortel address scaleability with their products. However, their traditional products generally do not scale below 50,000 to 60,000 subscribers. According to Summa Four's Carlino, "They sort of start there, and as the networks grow to very large subscriber bases -- several hundred thousand -- that is their scale range. That is a perfectly good solution if you have a very large footprint and you are Sprint PCS or somebody who can make the investment up front and not really achieve any kind of return until you get up to 75,000 or 100,000 subscribers."

Once the large-scale switch vendors achieve these high levels, it makes sense to pull enhanced services off of the switch and move them to service control points.

A lower-end switch category addresses the needs of small carriers, such as rural area and emerging C-block carriers. For these carriers, vendors offer a scheme in which one box supports 2,000 ports. When the carrier outgrows that box, it adds a second one and links the two. As the subscriber base and call volume grow, carriers repeat the process with a third and fourth unit. In other words, carriers can achieve scaleability simply by adding boxes.

Carlino suggested that this linking of boxes can create a fairly complicated environment requiring a high degree of management and attention to keep running.

Double the Ports Summa Four has introduced a scheme where it puts 4,000 ports in a single box. Carlino said this represents a scaleable solution that literally goes down to 1,000 subscribers or even fewer as the starting point.

"This allows your payback period to start much sooner and scales up to what could be a good representative size for second-tier city deployment," Carlino said.

This could mean as many as 75,000 customers, he said.

"It does so in a single box rather than a scheme that requires interconnecting of several different units and all of the problems that that brings with it," he said.

With double the ports, a product such as this clearly is targeting smaller or emerging players but may have a much broader appeal. Geotek is a good example. Although the company is large, its individual markets usually don't have more than a few thousand subscribers. Likewise, a C-block player may have a number of properties that either are disconnected from a larger footprint or are such that approximately 50,000 subscribers is all the carrier could realistically hope to obtain.

Smaller Footprints According to Carlino, this type of product isn't necessary only for the smaller players, but also for the players that have relatively small or challenging footprints to cover.

"There certainly are the large MTAs," he said. "But when you get past the first 40 or 50 MTAs, especially considering the financial problems these guys are having, putting something in that starts getting payback at the 5,000- or 10,000-subscriber level makes a lot more sense than at the 100,000-subscriber level."

If you are seeking a faster and more reliable enhanced services platform for communications and message delivery over global networks, you might find this upgrade news appealing. Call Sciences has launched its 6.0 architecture that will allow functional components to be added and integrated more easily. For example, the programming separates signaling from its call processing, database and billing applications, enabling the architecture to support a variety of signaling protocols such as SS7 and virtually all European signaling protocols.

This scaleable system architecture allows service providers to complement existing enhanced services with a suite of enhanced communications services. The architecture interfaces with existing voice-mail systems, which means that you can install this while preserving investments in your current voice-mail system hardware and software. All of the functionality of the legacy systems is incorporated under one umbrella of enhanced communications services.