Fueling the fiber: the Bells forge ahead with their FTTP plans—but what systems will they put in place to run their next-gen networks?

America's Network, Jan 15, 2004 by Shira Levine

"Fiber" has been the magic word in the telecom industry for the past six months, ever since Verizon, BellSouth and SBC issued their joint RFP for fiber-to-the-premises equipment. Yet even as the Bells announce their vendor selections and embark on their rollouts, they have remained largely silent on the operations support systems that will run their next-generation networks.

Keiko Harvey, senior vice president network process assurance at Verizon, acknowledges that the OSSs can be overlooked amid the fiber frenzy. "Creating and building the network is very important work, but sometimes people overlook OSS and processes," she says.

The Bells' primary reason for deploying FTTP is the bandwidth it affords--enough to roll out advanced on-demand services such as video and gaming. But advanced services require advanced OSSs that are capable of enabling them, and the RBOCs' legacy system were built for traditional TDM networks.

Representatives from all three RBOCs say they are actively evaluating the OSS requirements for their fiber networks. Verizon, for example, has conducted requirement-gathering sessions in which experts in a dozen or so process areas, including network creation, provisioning, ordering and service activation, meet to hash out the business requirements for each area. Verizon has completed the first phase of the sessions, Harvey says, and is now in the process of fine-tuning the requirements.

"We look at this as a great opportunity to change the business for us, in terms of the direction we want to push the network and processes," she says.

Both Harvey and Bob Bates, senior director of OSS planning at BellSouth, say that data integrity and inventory management systems are among the highest priorities for a successful FTTP deployment, particularly if the carriers want take full advantage of their bandwidth capabilities and offer self-provisioned, on-demand services. "The accuracy of the database is very important," Harvey says. "We've talked a lot about the need to provide the same information and tools to both our employees and our customers."

Bates names fault management, capacity management, business process management and service level management as other pressure points that need to be addressed if a FTTP network is to operate smoothly. "If you think about traditional networks, with TDM, you were guaranteed a certain allocation," he says. "Now we're talking about correlating layers, from layer one up through the OSI stack, which is far more complex."

VENDOR OPPORTUNITIES?

The question foremost in the mind of most OSS vendors is how many of the systems that will support the RBOCs' FTTP initiative will be brand new, commercial products and how many will be homegrown or extensions of existing OSSs. The answer seems to be all of the above. SBC declined to discuss the OSS aspect of its FTTP deployment plans, but several OSS experts say the RBOC is quietly testing off-the-shelf products in its labs. Verizon and BellSouth say they are looking at both internally-developed systems and customized off-the-shelf products.

"We need to be practical--telecom software off the shelf doesn't exist," Bates says. "If we do buy commercial products, they will need to be customized using our own domain knowledge. Where it makes financial sense, we will leverage existing systems. We have significant intellectual property in a couple of areas, and it makes sense to reuse that."

But Karl Whitelock, OSS program director at Stratecast Partners, questions the wisdom of leveraging existing systems for new networks. "We've had the RBOCs tell us that their systems are already taxed to their limits," he says. "What they're asking their systems to do now is not even close to being related to what was required when the original systems were built. The older they are, the harder it will be to address new services needs."

At the same time, the Bells have historically been hesitant to outsource their OSS development. Larry Goldman, a partner at consulting firm OSS Observer, believes that ultimately the RBOCs will continue the trend, building the OSSs for their FTTP networks themselves using some commercial software from their equipment suppliers and some independent software vendors. "They want a high degree of overall control of the FTTP capabilities, which includes the OSS," Goldman says. "I don't think they're going to simply leverage their legacy systems because they see FTTP as a totally new capability. Telcordia may be an important supplier for the FTTP OSS."