Mobile and Fixed IP eXchange helps service providers address new customer requirements

New technology and smarter fixed and mobile devices promise customers access to their information, social networks and a myriad of applications anytime and anywhere, but right now that access is fragmented and complicated. When service providers can make it simple and seamless, they will unlock unprecedented opportunities for their business, writes Oscar Ruiz, president of Global Telecoms Markets, BT Global Services. Co-sponsored features: BT Global Services

Following the introduction of IP communication for voice nearly a decade ago, use of VoIP switching equipment has increased in recent years to the point where established IP voice threatens to replace PSTN. As a result, the whole telecommunications industry is in transformation.

With the fast pace of technology change today, operators must find a new strategy to deploy IP services, compensate PSTN loss and secure future growth.

What do customers really want from their operator?

With the rise of the prosumer – a merger between consumers and professional users who want to use the advanced technology they know at work in the home and vice versa - serving customers has become increasingly difficult. Diversity and individualism are on the increase as customers look for devices, applications and services that evolve around their specific requirements rather than having to adapt to the available offers.

Customers want to access information and capabilities - content and applications - in their current environment at work, on the road or at leisure/in their home. Take the social network example: accessing Facebook, LinkedIn and others on a business PC at the office or via smartphone on the road or via personal netbook at home. Customers cherish the ability to stay in touch with their information and their relationships. This convergence calls for increased flexibility in how services are linked with each other and in the underlying infrastructure.

In parallel, as applications become available on multiple devices, customers look for simpler access methods for voice, data and media and try to combine capabilities in fewer and smarter devices.

These are the drivers for telecommunication and service providers to create new and innovative services that address multiple platforms and diversified devices while delivering a seamless experience where applications and content travel freely across fragmented networks and changing technologies.

Customers quickly find that they cannot achieve all this on a single network, even if the provider offers fixed, mobile and IP transport. Customers are not willing to isolate themselves with a single supplier, as capable as this supplier may be.

How can service providers serve those new emerging requirements?

Operators already know this sort of scenario from traditional voice services. They solved the problem by interconnecting their voice networks to allow calls to travel freely to any destination irrespective of origin. For IP and data applications, the public internet provides similar interconnectivity – but there is a downside: With traditional voice interconnections, all involved parties got quality and revenue-generating payments, which enabled sustainable business models. In the public internet world – at least until now – the participants getting the praise are the ones whose businesses run at the cost of the infrastructure providers.

Given the complexity of requirements for new services across networks - including quality of service, security, data integrity, transaction support and cascading payments – simple public internet connectivity is not enough anymore. Operators and service providers will have to develop partnerships for mutual benefit; these partnerships will eventually render disruptive business models unsustainable. This trend will also benefit customers by unlocking the ability to offer services across network boundaries without the limitations of today.

These changes for the telecommunications industry impact wholesale business the most: wholesale must provide the required infrastructure and interconnectivity to the telecoms and communications sector. Although operators, carriers, resellers and service providers compete with each other in the corporate and retail space, in wholesale they have an opportunity to exploit supplier relationships, partner models and sharing of resources to deliver to the market with each other’s help.

Traditionally wholesale focused on infrastructure and capacity for services such as TDM-based voice or classic bandwidth for data transport. Many carriers use wholesale to drive their assets, selling surplus capacity priced as a commodity.

The convergence of IT services and communication services drives operators to the next level, to transform their operations so they can innovate faster, reduce costs, become more flexible and thus offer truly integrated information and communications technology (ICT) services to their business and consumer customers. Transformation makes it possible for carriers to move up the value chain and create new-wave wholesale services. As enablers for businesses that face end customers, they also foster the emergence of new-wave service providers and mediate between the traditional telecommunications world and the IT space.

Interoperability is a core element of this new wholesale approach: Interoperability services enable communication providers to connect to each other, to connect their end users to other operators’ end users, and to pay and get paid for doing so. All this is independent of the technology, networks or devices used, creating the seamless experience customers want when they use communications services.

To play in the new communication market, carriers cannot act on their own. To succeed they must develop strategic partnerships with innovative software and content companies. In fact, differentiation of a carrier in the future will be based less on the size or quality of its network than on the richness of the range of services its users can access – including those from other parties (source: Gartner).

How can BT help operators to make the connection?

BT has taken on the task of enabling interoperability for seamless communications across networks and platforms – and making it available to wholesale markets. As a result, BT makes it simpler, cheaper and more secure for communication providers and service providers to connect, deliver services, pay and get paid for interconnectivity.

BT aims to provide a complete range of IP-based services to help carriers and communication providers keep pace with their end customers' requirements. And as all operators are different, BT offers them a building-block approach in three layers:

• Inter-provider connectivity through enhanced IP eXchange services
• Numbering and routing in the IP and TDM world (e.g. ENUM)
• Core value-added services and open application platforms enabling operators to create their own services, for example utilising other building blocks

Across these layers, to optimise all services, BT provides transaction and clearing, security, reporting and monitoring.

At the heart of the Interoperability framework the IP eXchange ensures direct interconnectivity between IP, fixed and mobile, cable and wireless networks. To adapt its capabilities to the needs of different operators, BT offers two propositions on its one platform: BT Mobile IP eXchange and BT Fixed IP eXchange.

Mobile IP eXChange

In today’s mobile networks, nearly all traffic is terminated via TDM. Although some operators have an IP core network, they cannot fully utilise it because they lack IP termination partners. But strong incentives drive the migration to IP. In a seamless end-to-end IP world, carriers can deliver higher quality on a simplified infrastructure with immediate cost savings from the closure of legacy networks and reduction of the number of interconnects for multiple services. Additional revenue opportunities become available from converged IP offerings and value-added services.

BT's Mobile IP eXchange manages traffic and ensures that a mobile user can securely communicate with anyone, regardless of the service, location, device or network. It also enables appropriate billing of all the parties involved.

The mobile IP eXchange will support IP voice services and IP signalling, including short message service and authentication. It can manage mobile data and multimedia messaging services and potentially video calls as well. It will offer presence- and location-based capabilities enabling a whole range of value-added services. All of these features can be combined to build bundled and integrated offerings for customers across network boundaries.

Such powerful interconnectivity must entail industry-standard compliance to ensure interoperability and attract network partnerships. Therefore BT’s offer aims to be IPIA compliant, fulfilling requirements such as openness, quality, efficiency and cascading payments.

To honour the various connection needs of the mobile operator - usually dependent on volumes, service, established business relationship and network set-up - BT Mobile IP eXchange will offer three GSMA-compliant options to connect:

• With a transport-only arrangement for established market participants, the existing commercial and contractual relationship remains between the parties exchanging traffic via BT’s IP eXchange.
• The service-transport option mirrors the termination mechanism from traditional voice services; the parties can implement existing transit models on the BT platform.
• In the service hub model all services - including the commercial and contractual relationship - are provided by BT as a hub; the parties do not have to negotiate directly.
• All these options are fully compliant with IPIA IPX requirements.

Fixed IPeXchange

Fixed network operators often face unique challenges in their migration from a TDM legacy to an IP- and NGN-based environment. When they address VoIP services and business models, they face an array of conversion points between the virtual end-to-end paths of fixed voice IP and TDM networks. Each conversion requirement increases the total cost of delivering the call, and also affects the fixed-cost elements in the network. End-to-end quality and feature availability become increasingly difficult to guarantee to the interconnection partners and thus to the end customers.

A strategy to address these issues lies in reducing conversion of IP to TDM for simple transport to a minimum and converting TDM to IP early in the process to enable the reduction of legacy components in the networks. Leveraging the BT global TDM and IP network with its routing information (ENUM) and flexible routing policies, BT’s Fixed IP eXchange uses this approach to the benefit of carriers, operators and service providers. They can deliver maximum end-to-end call quality with a minimum number of conversions and have an enhanced choice of options for international call quality and flexible pricing.

In all three connection models (transport only, service transport and service hub), BT manages transcoding of disparate voice codecs and provides inter-operator mediation and settlements. Exchange participants can align a special “pay as required” option with their customer market plans and growth.

Of course, integrated operators can combine Mobile IP eXchange and Fixed IP eXchange to address their special needs in each area.

Communication providers in fixed and mobile markets can use BT’s IP eXchange services to build a successful IP-based business model based on interoperability and ensure an effective migration from traditional to new-wave services. GTB

For more information about how BT can help you achieve interoperability, please contact us or see www.bt.com/globaltelecom.