Originally posted on 29May10 to IBM Developerworks ( 11,490 Views)
Here is the URL for this bookmark: http://apcmag.com/telstra-to-block-ipad-micro-sims-in-other-devices.htm Interesting… in the rest of the world (and as I heard repeatedly last week at TeleManagement World in Nice, France) Telcos are suffering from all you can eat plans – particularly plans for devices like the iPhone which encourages users to be online all the time and to consume rich media like movies. I heard from a number of Telcos that teenagers are preferring to watch movies on their iPhones in their bedrooms rather than in the lounge room on the normal TV (not that they can always get access tot he same movies on the TV) – surely a larger screen will encourage more of that sort of behaviour. This is driving too much traffic on Telcos 3G networks with flat rate plans. Optus have also announced a similar all you can eat plan for their iPads.
At almost the same time, both Optus and VHA (Vodafone Hutchison Australia) have offered unlimited 3G plans for just AU$50. It makes me wonder if these Telcos in Australia are listening to other Telcos around the world. There’s been a lot of press about AT&T’s network problems associated with iPhone users. I know the world would be a perfect place if we learnt from everyone else’s mistakes, but come on – you don’t need to be a genius to see how this could damage their business. I guess they see this as a competitive pressure – if their rivals do it, then they have to as well – I had hoped that the Australian Telcos would be (jointly) a bit more sensible about it.
I do not have any Apple products and I’ll admit to a bit of jealousy at an all you can eat plan for only AU$50 when I get about 1 Gb for a similar amount on my Nokia e71 – it doesn’t seem fair that I get so much less for similar money on the same network – just because of the device I choose to use…
Originally posted on 19May10 to IBM Developerworks (9,827 Views)
While IBM missed out on winning the TeleManagement Excellence awards this year (congratulations to those four competition winners (see the winners on the TMF web site) we do have a great stand with multiple demos (I haven’t counted, but I think there are six demos) and a small meeting area. Check out the photos below:
Originally posted on 19May10 to IBM Developerworks (9,582 Views)
TeleManagement World conference, 2010. Nice France.
Keynote Speaker
Lui Aili, Board Director for China Mobile
Lui Aili, Board Director for China Mobile presented this morning at the TeleManagement World conference in Nice, France. Mr Lui spoke of China mobile’s challenges. For them, Internet based competitors posed a real threat, despite the size of China Mobile (more than 528 million subscribers) they see companies like Google (with GTalk) and Skype, but also device manufacturers such as Apple and Nokia as providing on device applications and value added services on their own devices which reduces China Mobiles function down to a bit carrier. As Mr Lui put it, these companies “moved our cheese” 😉
For China Mobile, to compete with these Internet based companies, they needed to radically reduce their costs – to do this, they started a project about six years ago to move to an all IP network from their existing legacy network. This architectural move reduced their Capex by a massive 68%. The reduction was through reduced administration and management costs (by re-organising their operational management system and spreading it across all of their IP networks)
Strategy for IP transformation
China Mobile’s network services are predominantly occupied by low value services – straight 2G services. They undertook a detailed analysis to look at network utilisation and management tools to better manage their network and control the customer experience. For them, ALL IP is not the same as All-in-one IP. they are separating their IP customers into high and low value services with security barriers in place – they have a separate virtual network for high value services and for low value standard services. He did not state it directly, but I took it to mean that they have different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) associated with the high and low value services.
From a network administration perspective, they have implemented network management agents at as many points as possible – including every router to enable efficient and rapid fault discovery and correction.
For China Mobile, IP skill levels among their staff was a key success factor – Mr Lui spoke of it multiple times, including implementing comprehensive training schemes for their staff.
“IP Transformation has been a huge task… the job is fare from finished” Mr Lui said. Despite this, he also said that right now, almost all of their voice traffic is already carried over their IP infrastructure In summary, Mr Lui made the following points:
IP transformation simplifies the network, but males O&M more complex. .
Operators must invest in OSS systems to make IP networks and transformation more efficient.
Originally posted on 06May10 to IBM Developerworks (16,509 Views)
ICE present at Impact’10
In Costa Rica, the government owned telco – ICE is being forced to open up it’s market to competitors because of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that Costa Rica has joined. This represented a huge change for ICE who were a Power and Communications provider, without a competitor in their market, they didn’t have any competitive forces to push them to modernise their systems and processes. For instance, fulfilment of basic services took weeks as a result.
GBM, an IBM business partner and IBM Software group proposed to ICE that they base their new OSS/BSS architecture on the TeleManagement Forum’s Frameworx (eTOM, TAM, SID, TNA) – for which they used the WebSphere Telecom Content Pack and IBM Dynamic Process Edition to ensure ICE would have the standards compliance and dynamic BPM capabilities. By using WTCP and DPE, ICE reduced the effort required to build and deploy their new processes by an estimated 20-50%. A fundamental principle of Dynamic BPM is the Business Services layer which sits on top of the BPM layer which in turn sits on the SOA layer. A Business Service is abstracted up from the physical process. For instance, a business service might be ‘Check Technical Availability’ which would apply regardless of the service you are talking about – mobile, POTS or xDSL. These business services are defined within the Telecom Content Pack which enables system integrators like GBM to accelerate the architecture work on projects like this one for ICE.
GBM made use of IBM’s Rapid Delivery Environment (RDE) – where they sent a number of their architects to the IBM Telecom Solution Lab in Austin, Texas for six weeks to conduct a proof of concept and to learn how to apply WTCP to a real customer situation such as that faced by ICE. The RDE allowed GBM to work with the IBM experts to build the first few scenarios so that GBM could continue the work locally in Costa Rica without a lot of assistance from IBM. The other benefit of using the RDE is to get access to the eTOM level 4,5 and 6 assets – the connections to the physical systems that the RDE has previously developed. For instance, the connection to Oracle Infranet Billing engine which can then be reused by other customers who also engage with the RDE.
GBM and ICE have not yet been able to measure that acceleration that WTCP and DPE provided, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it was significant. In preparation for CAFTA, ICE have already launched a 3G network and are preparing to launch pre-paid services in preparation to compete with several new operators that will enter the market this year.
Originally poster on 05May10 to IBM Developerworks (16,501 Views)
AT&T are part way through a major SOA/BPM project which if you know a little about their history* must be an enormous task. They are introducing modelling tools and reverse modelling their existing systems as well as using a tool from iRise to prototype the user interfaces and reduce the risk of not hitting the business requirements.
They have deployed Rational Requisite Pro to capture requirements without the need to get users away from their beloved MS Word. In the last five months, their requirements have gone from 15,000 requirements registered in January to over 30,000 now. Certainly illustrates the traction that they are achieving with their business people. Users access Req Pro via Citrix sessions and the tools are available to thousands of business users.
AT&T are also exposing WebSphere Business Modeler and iRise to a smaller set of subject matter expert users – building a Centre of Excellence in UI design and Process Modelling. So far, they have modelled over 800 process flows base on eTOM models which have been extended to meet their specific requirements. All of these are stored within a common Rational Asset Manager instance which helps their business analysts to improve asst use and reuse.
Those process models feed directly into the model driven development method which is aligned with the requirements and process models. That MDD method uses WebSphere Integration Developer(WID), Rational Software Architect (RSA) for development and WebSphere Process Server (WPS) runtime. WebShere Business Modeler and WebShere Services Registry and Repository (WSRR) in support of the runtime. IBM GBS have put in place processes to support AT&T’s development life cycle and governance requirements.
Key success factors that AT&T see include:
Solve Critical Business Problems
Win over senior Exec support
Achieve Business Partner Alignment
Integrated Tools Approach
Organisational transformation
Infrastructure investment
Communicate, communicate, communicate!
* AT&T have been through multiple de-mergers and mergers and acquisitions over the past 10 years resulting in a hugely complex IT environment.
Originally posted on 05May10 to IBM Developerworks ( 8,995 Views)
Orange in France are using WebSphere sMash to provide an easy development environment using PHP and Groovy to build Telco enabled applications that consume Orange Application Programming Interface (API) which are exposed through pre-built widgets. The custom Orange API is not compliant with either OneAPI or ParlayX and I would normally not endorse a custom API like this, but time to market forces meant that Orange had to move before the (OneAPI) standards were in place. What I would take from their experience in France is their model and use cases. All of which could be done and (now) use standards for those APIs. Interestingly, I think that Orange could also use IBM Mashup Center to support developers with even less skills that the PHP and Groovy developers they’re currently targeting.
Originally poster on 05May10 to IBM Developerworks (13,014 Views)
Gridit is a Finnish company that is providing online retail services which was only founded in 2009. They are owned by nine local network providers. Think of them as an aggregated application store that sells a broad range of services and products from those nine network companies as well as third party content providers. They plan to sell services and content such as:
Music
Games
e-books
Access
Data storage
Information Security
Home services
VoIP
IPTV
They do not make exclusive agreements with the content/service providers and provide their customers with freedom of choice. For Gridit, the customer is king – they will seek out new content providers if there is demand from the customers. Gridit also interact with local network providers and 3rd party content providers giving the customers a single point of contact and billing for the services that they resell.
What Gridit are providing is pretty similar to an app store solution we deployed last year in Vietnam which was also a joint venture by a number of Telcos and a bank which provided a retail online store for products and services from those communications providers as well as 3rd party content providers except that Gridit are also offering a hosted wholesale service – I could go to Gridit and build my new company ‘Larmourcom’ and offer products and services from a range of providers that Gridit front end for Larmourcom. Gridit can stand up an online commerce portal for Larmourcom and also provide an interface to the back end providers to allow for traditional and non-traditional service assurance, fulfilment and billing processes.
To achieve this abstraction from the back end providers, Gridit have used WebSphere Telecom Content Pack to provide an architectural framework and accelerator for all of those services. IBM has helped Gridit to map those processes as defined within the TeleManagement Forum’s standards (eTOM, TAM, SID) and map them to the lower level processes to wherever the content or services come from.
Like the Vietnamese app store, Gridit are also using WebSphere Commerce to provide the online commerce and catalogue. For Gridit, the benefits they expect to see (as a result of a Business Value Assessment that was conducted) was 48% faster time to value by using Dynamic BPM and Telecom Content Pack versus a traditional BPM model. That is real business value and a great story for both Gridit and IBM.
Originally posted on 04May10 to IBM Developerworks (9,176 Views)
Ed Jung, Telus Canada
Telus is a Communications Service Provider in Canada, the second largest in their market with 12M connections (wireline, mobile and broadband). Telus have a very complex mix of products, services and systems and they need to maximise their investments while still be able to grow and maintain a lid on their costs. New projects still need to be implemented through good times and bad, so they need an architecture that will allow Telus to continue to grow and maintain costs through a range of economic conditions. Telus selected an agile method/strategy where a reasonable investment early on with the plan to become agile and support new ‘projects’ through small add ons in terms of investment. Ed Jung from Telus characterised the ‘projects’ in the later stages as rule or policy changes which may or may not require a formal release.
To achieve this agility, Telus are using WebShere Telecom Content Pack (WTCP) as an accelerator to keep costs down, while still maintaining standards compliance for their architecture. He sees key success factors as: Selecting a key implementation partner (IBM)
Using standards where possible to maintain consistency
For Telus, they elected to start with fulfilment scenarios within their IPTV system. The basis for this is a data mapping to and from a common model – within the TeleManagement Forum’s standards, that relates to the SID. Ed sees this common model as key to their success.
Dynamic endpoint selection is used within Telus to enable their processes to integrate and participate with their BPM layer. Ed suggest the key factors for a successful WTCP project are:
Adopt a reference architecture
Select a good partner
Seed money for lab trials
Refine architecture
Choose correct pilots
Put governance in place (business and architects)
Configure data / reduce code
Ed thinks that last point (configure data / reduce code) is the best description of an agile architecture that really drive lower total cost of ownership for projects as well as a lower capital expenditure for each project.
Originally posted on 21Feb10 to IBM Developerworks where it got 12,303 Views
Providing a National Broadband Network within a country is seen by many governments as a way to help their population and country compete with other countries. I have been involved in three NBN projects; Australia, Singapore and New Zealand. I don’t claim to be an expert in all three projects (which are ongoing) but I though I would share some observations and comparisons between the three projects.
Where Australia and Singapore have both opted to build a new network with (potentially) new companies running it, New Zealand has taken a different path. The Kiwis have decided to split the incumbent (and formerly monopoly) Telecom New Zealand into three semi-separated ‘companies’ Retail, Wholesale and Chorus (the network), but only for the ‘regulated products’ which for the New Zealand government is ‘broadband’. They all still report to a single TNZ CEO. I have not seen any direction in terms of Fibre to the Home or Fibre to the Node, just defined the product as ‘broadband’. The really strange thing with this split is that the three business units will continue to operate as they did in the past for other non-regulated products such as voice.
As an aside, the Kiwi government not regulating voice seems an odd decision to me – especially when you compare it to countries like Australia and the USA where the government has mandated that the Telcos provide equivalent voice services to the entire population. Sure, New Zealand is a much smaller country, but it is not without it’s own geographic challenges in providing services to all kiwis, yet
Telecom NZ is now Spark
A key part of the separation is that these three business units are obliged to provide the same level of service to external companies as they provide to Telecom and it’s other business units. For example if Vodafone wants to sell a Telecom Wholesale product, then Telecom Wholesale MUST treat Vodafone identically to the way they treat Telecom Retail. Likewise Chorus must do the same for it’s customers which would include ISPs as well as potentially other local Telcos (Vodafone, Telstra Clear and 2Degrees). This equivalency of input seems to me to be an attempt to get to a similar place to Singapore (more on that later). Telecom NZ have already spent tens of million of NZ$ to this point and they don’t have a lot to show for it yet. It seems to me like the Government is trying to get to a NBN state of play by using Telecom’s current network and perhaps adding to that as needed. For the kiwi population, that’s not anything flash like fibre to the home, but more like Fibre to the node and then have a DSL last mile connection. That will obviously limit the sorts of services that could be delivered over that network. When other countries are talking about speeds in excess of 100Mbps to the home, New Zealand will be limited to DSL speeds until the network is extended to a full FTTH deployment (not planned at the moment as far as I am aware)
Singapore, rather than split up an existing telco (like Singtel or Starhub) have gone to tender for the three layers – Network, Wholesale and Retail. The government (Singapore Ltd) has decided that should only be one network and run by one company (Nucleus Connect – providing Fibre to the Home), that there would be a maximum of three wholesale companies and as many retail companies as the market will support. A big difference to New Zealand is that the Singapore government wants the wholesalers to offer a range of value added services – that they refer to as ‘sit forward’ services to engage the population rather than ‘sit back’ services that do not engage the population base. Retail companies would be free to pick and choose wholesale products for different wholesalers to provide differentiation of services.
Singapore, New Zealand and Australia are vastly different countries – Singapore is only 700km2 in size, Australia is a continent in it’s own right and new Zealand is at the smaller end of in between. This is naturally going to have a dramatic effect on each Government’s approach to a NBN. Singapore’s highly structured approach is typical of the way Singapore does things. Australia’s approach is less controlled – due to the nature of the political environment in Australia rather than it’s size and New Zealand’s approach seems somewhat half-hearted by comparison. I am not sure why the NZ government has not elected to build a new network independent of Telecom NZ’s current network.
In Australia on the other hand, the government have set up the Communications Alliance to manage the NBN and subcontract to the likes of Telstra, Optus and others. The interesting thing with that approach (other than the false start that has already cost the Australian Taxpayers AU$30 million) and the thing that sets it apart from Singapore is that the approach doesn’t seem to have any focus on the value added services (unlike Singapore’s approach) – it’s all about the network, even the wholesaler plan for Australia is talking about layer 2 protocols (See The Communications Alliance Wiki. All of the documents I have seen from Communications Alliance are all about the network – all very low level stuff.
Of course, these three countries are not the only countries that are going through a NBN project. For example the Philippines had a shot at one a few years ago – the bid was won by ZTE, but then a huge scandal caused the project to be abandoned. It came back a while later as the Government Broadband Network (GBN) but that doesn’t really help the average Filipino. It’s interesting to see how these projects develop around the world…
Originally posted on 02Feb10 to IBM Developerworks where it got 15,259 Views
On the Wednesday of the week before last (the week before my leave) at about 1am my time, I got an urgent request for a RFI response to be presented back to the customer at Friday noon (GMT+8 – 3pm for me – 2.5 business days for the locals in that timezone). This RFI was asking lots of hypothetical questions about what this particular telco might do with their Service Delivery Platform (SDP). It had plenty of requirements like “Email service” or “App Store Service” and so on. These ‘use cases’ made up 25% of the overall score, but did not have any more detail than I have quoted here. Two to four words for each use case. Crazy! If I am responding to this, such loose scope means I can interpret the use cases any way that I want. It also means that to meet all the use cases (14 in all) ranging from ‘Instance Messaging Presence Service (IMPS)’ to ‘Media Content and Management Service’ to ‘Next-Generation Network Convergence innovative services’ the proposal and the system would have to be a monster with lots of components. The real problem with such vague requirements is that vendors will answer the way they think the customer wants them to, rather than the customer telling them what they want to see in the response. The result will be six or eight different responses that vary so much that they cannot be compared which is the whole point of running the RFI process – to compare vendors and ultimately select one to grant the project to.
On top of the poor quality of the RFI itself, the lack of time to respond creates great difficulties for the people responding. ‘So what, I don’t care, it’s there job’ you might expect them to say and to an extent you are correct, but think about it like this: A short timeframe to respond means that the vendor has to find whoever they can internally to respond – they don’t have time to find the best person. A short timeframe means that the customer is more likely to get a cookie cutter solution (one that the vendor has done before) rather than a solution that is designed to meet their actual needs. A short timeframe means that the vendor may not have enough time to do a proper risk assessment and quality assurance on the proposal – both of which will increase the cost quoted on the proposal.
All of these factors should be of interest to the Telco that is asking for the proposal because they all have a direct effect on the quality and price of the project and ultimately the success of the project.
I know this problem is not unique to the Telecom industry, but of all the industries I have worked with in my IT career, the Telcos seem to do it more often. I could go on and on quoting examples of ultra short lead times to write proposals – sometimes as little as 24 hours (to answer 600 questions in that case), but all it would do is get me riled up thinking about them.
The whole subject reminds me of what my boss in a photolab (long before my IT career began) would say “Quality, Speed, Price: Pick two”. Think about it – it rings true doesn’t it?
