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Flanagan Consulting
Network Analysts and Consultants
"We Have the Experience"
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ViewsLetter on
Provisioning 23 Nov
2003 #33
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A fortnightly look at provisioning automation.
PLATFORMS FOR PRE-PAID IP SERVICES
MOVE NETS TOWARD SELF PROVISIONING
Carrier Hosts Your Firewall and Virus Screen,
Not Just Access--You Set It Up From A Browser
--William A. Flanagan, Editor and Publisher
Pre-paid phone cards are more common around the world than in the US,
so we shouldn't be surprised that pre-paid Internet access has rolled
out across Chile before becoming significant here.
What surprises is the breadth of features offered: bandwidth
choices (64, 300, 500 kbit/s), firewall, virus protection, and a choice
of paying for full-time flat-rate access or buying it by the
minute. What's better, it's all on-demand.
In some sense, the IP service model is built on that of telephony, just
with a different feature set. You can compare pre-paid Internet
to using a pre-paid service at any phone, public or private. The
procedure of dialing the 800 access number in telephony morphs into
authenticating yourself and configuring the service you want at a Web
portal from your browser. Once the housekeeping details are
settled, you dial a voice call or request a connection on
the Internet.
The specific application is Broadband Flex service offered by VTR, a
major broadband access provider in Chile, over its video cable
system. They also offer local exchange service for voice.
The service's hardware is Nortel's Shasta 5000 Broadband Service Node
(BSN), which was designed to have the processing capacity needed to run
individualized services while routing IP packets. Each customer
gets to configure his service through a web portal. Nortel
resells the RIO product for this function.
The setup offers some intriguing possibilities for any IP service
provider, but particularly incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (LECs).
--A requirement to authenticate and admit each user of the pre-paid
service means that a LEC can provision active IP access on all lines
without fearing theft of service.
--Once the service is available on-demand, the cost to activate a paying customer and start a revenue stream is next to nothing.
Of course there are costs to preparing the network: Shasta nodes,
web portals, and equivalents do cost real money. But once that
infrastructure is in place, the current method of activating
"tiny-revenue" POTS voice on a residential local loop will cost more
than turning up "bigger-revenue" broadband Internet access. And
by the way, the same self-service process on a web portal lends itself
to activating voice (over IP) at the same time.
LECs with rights to offer long distance service could gain substantial
advantage from a "converged" network, even without video
products. Not only would revenue streams start earlier, the cost
to acquire those new customers would drop sharply.
This solution is not the "any service, any speed" vision stated in
ViewsLetter #1. IP service platforms don't provide the local loop
access technology for the physical connection--that's still DSL, cable,
fiber, etc., and remains a separate consideration.
But IP on demand, separated from the provisioning of physical access,
is still a big step toward automated provisioning. It also has
certain implications, for better or worse:
-- As each user must authenticate, creating a way to
prevent address spoofing: tough on anonymous spammers.
-- But then there's no way to be anonymous without
using a proxy server: Big Brother may indeed be watching.
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-- Call Flanagan Consulting when you need independent review and
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"Flanagan Consulting" and "ViewsLetter" are
Service Marks of W. A. Flanagan, Inc.
Updated: 17 July 2004 2003
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