From MPLS to IPTV -- Lessons Learned
by Thomas Maufer on 11 November 2008 - 09:22:20 PM
Mu's had quite a few customer and prospect demonstrations around newer Service Level Traffic variation and related Mu Test Suite automation capabilities during the last month. From 20-31 October, the every 2 year MSF GMI event; from 19-22 October there was MPLS 2008; and on Nov 6, a customer case-study
seminar for leading operators and vendors. This week offers IMS-based IPTV demonstrations at TelcoTV in Anaheim.
Despite the differences in
scale and content, these events had a number of leading operators and
vendors with similar concerns - managing increasingly complexity in
their IP services without sacrificing quality or increasing customer churn.
The transition to IP-based networks is well underway. Backbone operators are using (and have been for quite a while) MPLS -- which is a whole family of technologies -- to scale their core networks as well as to extend virtual private LAN service (VPLS) to customers. MPLS-based networks even allow providers to offer circuit emulation services over packet cores, which is much cheaper than using end-to-end TDM
infrastructures to offer circuits to customers. Soon, most leading
network operators will have a completely packet-switched core network
where the links operate at 100 Gbps
or higher, and the very concept of a link is blurred by the fact that
many links can be optically multiplexed on a single fiber.
In these 21st-century networks,
virtually all of the effort involved in physically moving traffic is
done in hardware. However, the control and management planes are in
increasingly complex as network load means that the robustness of the
control and management planes is hyper-critical to the profitable
operation of these networks. Complexity is not only located at the MPLS layer. The IMS-based IPTV network that was built and tested for GMI was breathtakingly complex. Our demonstrations to Verizon and leading suppliers graphically displayed that despite this complexity it was possible for multiple vendors to interoperate. Carriers are making huge investments in next-generation network applications like IPTV, and they frequently employ MPLS-based networks using IMS signaling.
The common lesson for all networked
applications is that service delivery is fragile. The operator must
ensure that all key software, middleware
and hardware components involved in offering a service can seamlessly
handle a wide variety of invalid or unexpected inputs. The business
benefit is clear: Using battle-proven products in the network build out
means less downtime, resulting in lower customer churn due to poor
service quality. Less downtime means a network operator has a more
stable platform on which to confidently roll out new service offerings.
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