NPTs views on the ongoing NGN transition

Transcription

1 NPTs views on the ongoing NGN transition Johan Foldoy, Norwegian Post and Telecommunication Authorities (jfo(at)npt.no) ETSI STQ Workshop 1-2 July 2009 ETSI, Sophia Antipolis, France

2 Some external conditions for service providers Population scattered mainly along the coastline Remote areas presents challenges for communication providers People demand access no matter where they live

3 Statistics, Norwegian telecom marked Service (subscribers) Growth POTS/ISDN - 5 % VoIP (fixed) 11 % Mobile 4 % Mobile broadband 186 % Fixed broadband 10 %

4 Fixed-line subscribers Red line: yearly growth. Blue bars: number of subscribers

5 Mobile subscribers Red line: yearly growth. Blue bars: number of subscribers

6 Driving forces behind today s evolution? A clear and pronounced transition from analog and ISDN towards mobile and broadband telephony Strong demand for broadband access and multimedia services. This has led to largescale production of equipment (DSL, 3G and cable modems, home gateways) and lowered costs and better coverage Operators are forced to focus on centralization and rationalisation of both management and maintenance in order to reduce costs Packet-based techologies (IP, Ethernet) make it possible to produce different kinds of services on a common platform. This leads to synergistic effects and thus a better chance for profit Expected lifetime for network equipment is reduced, making replacement speed higher than before (but with some exceptions)

7 Transition from ATM to Ethernet not as fast as imagined? Incumbent operator (Telenor): We have had a strong ambition to quicly migrate to Ethernet based DSLAM platforms (edslam) to meet the strong growth of customers, capacities and services. This growth has now strongly decreased, further reducing the need for edslam. Due to this, Telenor plans for a considerably longer lifespan for BAP and will reduce the distribution of edslam BAP Broadband Access Point (ATM)

8 Transition scenario 1. Serve growth through overlay capasity 2. When appropriate, investment in legacy network is haltet 3. When legacy network reach critical level, operators own initiative completes transition

9 Aspects of IP transformation: at one or more levels Source: Alcatel-Lucent whitepaper

10 Different perspectives major challenges?

11 Considerations we d like to see before operators go NGN 1. Planning 2. Implementation 3. Migration/transition 4. Operations

12 Planning A fair practice: evaluate your products and services; which should be migrated/continue in legacy network/discontinued? Consider the meaning of distributed architecture: security (across multiple products, platform and vendors - consistent approach to secure design?), performance (greatly varying demands between different services) and resiliency Organisational readiness: not only the tech-guys! Involve external stakeholders (enterprise customers, SMB, wholesale customers, regulator)

13 Implementation Be serious about interoperability testing allow time for element-to-element function verification Repeat this step for every major future revisions Allocate resources necessary for development of updated revision control and documentation programs all to be handed over to operations before going live

14 Migration/transition Rule 1: Make public all planned changes/updates of existing technical interfaces. Important for both endusers and wholesale customers. (also regulated in laws of electronic communications) Conduct feature parity considerations Allocate resources to insure the data quality is reliable across all sources for the migration program (provisioning systems, billing systems, circuit inventory databases, switch databases etc.) Be prepared for, and do not underestimate, the logistical complexity of migrating potentially millions of customers Develop (and test) roll-back plans, should problems arise

15 Operations What is the operational impact of the transition period itself? Make sure updated skills are at hand (to support multiple services delivered over multiple access networks) All-IP: from a network-based to a service-based management model??

16 Case: personal alarm systems CareTech unit chosen for illustrational purpose only

17 Alarm systems: known issues Loss of power (in-house) may lead to Home gateway/router/modem fails The handset may fail Power outage in the carriers access and/or core network DTF-signaling misunderstood by gateway codec(s) Increased number of HW/SW SPOF s (Single Point of Failure): modem, router, converter, adapter etc. Loss of broadband connection

18 Summary Migrating to NGN should be beneficial to all parties; customers, carriers and the industry at large From a regulators point of view, we d like to see wellplanned migration scenarios in accordance with the mentioned issues (planning, implementation, migration, operations) Standardization has been vital for the performance of legacy networks, and will probably be even more so in the highly complex and distributed next generation networks and finally: as a regulator, we re happy to be kept up to date on carriers plans and to offer any advise should it be needed