What happens when the ability to roll out high-speed links and bundled services outpaces the availability of proactive management software? Unfortunately, you get inefficient provisioning, broken services, frustrated users, subscriber churn, and carriers who fail to fully realize revenue potential.

This is all too common for providers addressing the residential Triple Play and business Ethernet services markets. Providers today are vying to grow their services revenue and limit operational costs in order to increase profitability. To achieve this, they are offering advanced IP and Ethernet services, and moving to the more efficient Carrier Ethernet Transport network model.

But, there are challenges associated with converging networks that are not addressed by traditional element and network management software. Revenue is delayed as carriers struggle with the provisioning complexities associated with offering multiple, new services over their networks. Additionally, providers must find a way to minimize subscriber churn. Oftentimes, churn is further exacerbated by inadequate troubleshooting tools that make problem-solving a slow process. Finally, the increased complexity of traffic engineering results in inefficient use of network assets.

Traditional element management tools do not have what it takes for carriers to effectively compete in today’s market for broadband services because they do not offer a services-based view of the network. They do not properly abstract the complexity associated with today’s networks. Furthermore, manual processes are too slow, do not scale, and are error-prone.

Providers must shift from reactive circuit monitoring to proactive service management with the goal of retaining subscribers, increasing operating efficiency, and increasing their revenue potential. These providers need a new set of visual service management tools that include point-and-click provisioning to accelerate service revenues, simplified service troubleshooting to increase subscriber loyalty, and visual traffic engineering to increase the efficiency of the underlying transport network.

Mending That Which Is Broken
A good example of the competitive landscape for converged networks and bundled services -- and why service management is so critical to providers -- is the popular Triple Play package of residential services combining telephony, high-speed Internet access, and video over a common access line. With these bundles, service providers offer a reduced-price package that represents the lifeline for the average person today. Increased competition means more choices for subscribers, so that a disruption in service often results in a swift cancellation with the current provider and a switch to a new provider.

How well providers prevent service disruptions, and how quickly they remedy problems has long been key to remaining competitive.

The other side of the fence is the business customer. Businesses are attracted to the converged services model in which they pay for a single high-performance access line that delivers a bundle of services that were previously offered from multiple networks over multiple access lines.

In the past, businesses would order voice lines from a phone company, then they would buy a second set of access lines (and pay for them separately) for private data services. Adding Internet access meant acquiring yet a third line, often from a different provider, creating a scenario in which multiple lines independently carried each service.

In today’s business Ethernet scenario, a carrier can offer private data networks, Internet access and voice services over a single Ethernet access line -- certainly a more economical approach. But it is also an approach that increases subscriber sensitivity to outages because downtime in this scenario means voice, private data and Internet are unavailable, and business can potentially come to a screeching halt.

As service providers deploy Ethernet Transport networks to support an array of IP and Ethernet services, the need for simplified provisioning, troubleshooting and traffic engineering is magnified. Enter proactive service management.

With traditional element management tools, providers would know only that a link was down. They would have no insight into what subscribers and what services were impacted by the failure.

Providers building a network for the future need to stop looking at the network as a set of circuits, and instead look at it through the eyes of the subscriber, focusing on the actual service -- the thing they are selling -- rather than just circuits.

Service providers need to shift from reactive circuit monitoring to proactive service management, which goes well beyond traditional element and network management systems. With this change, they will enhance their subscriber’s experience, reducing churn and increasing loyalty, they will accelerate revenue by provisioning new services faster, and they will increase their network efficiency.

Point-and-Click Provisioning Promises
Turning on new services with traditional element management systems is far more complicated than it needs to be. With traditional element management systems, providers are not able to provision a new service by pointing to a network map, selecting a port, and assigning a service that is assured by every element in the network. Incorrect configurations and slow deployment of new services are a common side effect of this approach.

In order to alleviate these problems, providers need a point and click provisioning system that gives them the ability to provision new services and support transport protocols [such as VLANs, Provider Bridging (PB), Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB), and resilient ring protocols such as Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS)] with a few simple mouse clicks.

Once customers are signed up, carriers must do everything in their power to retain that subscriber and avoid subscriber churn. That is where service assurance comes in. It involves real-time visibility into the active path of a specific service and visual indication of up/down status.

Traditional approaches to network management make service assurance a significant challenge. Once the operator is notified of an alarm, the process involved to correlate the impact on services is tedious and time-consuming because the operator is in a reactive rather than a proactive management mode.

For example, suppose an alarm indicates that a particular link is down. The operator must first determine which VLANs are on the link. Next, they must figure out which network elements are associated with these VLANs. The operator must then determine which ports are active or inactive on those network elements, and then check a separate database to determine which services are mapped to the active ports. These steps require the operator to run a number of CLI commands and to have detailed knowledge about the network when executing them. It is easy to see that having to perform these tasks for every alarm is not a simple task.

For providers, it is critical to be able to hide the complexity of the converged network, with detailed and easy-to-understand representations of service status or issues, regardless of their origination. Providers need a detailed, consolidated view of the entire services network, including up/down status, and fault-to-service correlation that provide a quick graphical view of physical links, VLANs, and the specific services which have been impacted.

This type of detailed information is essential because it provides network operators the ability to easily determine which subscribers and which of their services have been affected. Based on the magnitude of impact, network operators can effectively prioritize their troubleshooting tasks for resolution. Better still, with a proactive management solution, network operators may develop automated responses to known failure modes, and notify subscribers of outages before the subscriber discovers the problem.

Creating Efficiencies for a Home Sweet Home
Because carriers will continue to offer an increasing array of IP and Ethernet services and consequently, simplified service engineering must grow in direct proportion. Service engineering kicks traffic engineering up a notch, giving carriers the visual tools needed to see how new services impact the transport network, and drive economies of scale by layering as many services as possible onto the network without compromising the quality of service.

Proactive service management software enables automated discovery and service visualization -- features that provide easy access to detailed network usage information such as bandwidth commitments and/or link utilization statistics, as well as data on service usage and traffic patterns. Based on this information, network operators can quickly find optimum traffic routes and make the most of link capacities to maximize network utilization.

Carriers will not survive with a service management strategy that relies on the subscriber being first to discover outages. Without the ability to quickly provision new services, promptly troubleshoot service outages and correlate faults to services, providers will lose subscribers to the competition. In this new era of broadband services, visionary service providers are shifting from reactive circuit monitoring to proactive service management to successfully differentiate in the marketplace.

About the Author
Mark Showalter is Senior Director of Service Provider Marketing, Extreme Networks. He has more than 20 years of experience in data communications and carrier service management. For more information visit www.extremenetworks.com/solutions/carrier-ethernet.aspx.

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