Yogi Berra-isms of Telecom

Yogi Berra-ism #1 - "It's like deja vu all over again."

There is a fascinating wave of rethinking in the telecom arena that makes me think of Yogi Berra-isms for some reason. Along with my love of history, it is with Yogi’s wisdom and inspiration that I reflect on some of the attention that technologies of the day are getting.

While traveling the blogosphere, I came across the following statistic - 92% of Telco Professionals say 'Strategic Re-Think' a Key Priority. It's not the first time that we, the service provider community, have been trained to believe that the technology or product will solve all our woes. Let's get a historical perspective to prove the point. Let's visit some of the past propaganda and see if there's a common theme.

First it was the rational behind Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN). The following definition provided by Intel's Telecom Glossary. ' The Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN) is a telephone network architecture that separates service logic from switching equipment, allowing new services to be added without having to redesign switches to support new services. Developed by Bell Communications Research, AIN is recognized as an industry standard in North America.'

"Bell Atlantic Demonstrates AIN Telecom Technology 03/12/92 BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, U.S.A., 1992 MAR 12 (NB) -- Bell Atlantic has demonstrated a technology called Advanced Intelligent Network, which uses computers in modern phone switches to quickly define new services on subscriber lines. The company said this could speed the arrival and cut the development costs of new services by factors of several thousand or more.

"The astonishing leap in network efficiency offered by AIN promises to open a new chapter in telecommunications history in which new services will be available to customers on demand, and exotic technologies such as portable handheld phones will become commonplace," said John Seazholtz, Bell Atlantic vice president of technology."

OK - so just so that we are all on the same page here, AIN was (and still barely is) around as an attempt to separate the service and application invocation logic from the switching fabirc. It's important to keep in mind the state of the technology at the time that this idea was conceived. The switch manufacturers were required to open up somewhere in the range of 10+ million lines of code in order to gain the ability to support a new service. It doesn't take a genius to understand the key to delivering new features and services is in making it simple. In order to make it simple, a concerted effort of unbundling had to be undertaken. Enter AIN. So why didn't it work and get adopted if it was so logical? It so happens that the carriers interested in AIN wouldn’t permit the suppliers of the technology to sell it to other carriers, for competitive reason. It’s not a tactic that brings the best to bare via competition. So the "unbundled golden nugget" remained elusive.

Yogi Berra-ism #2 - "The future ain't what it used to be "

Next in our journey along the lines of telecom technical evolution is the Softswitch. The concept of the softswitch is a continuation of the unbundling theme. A Softswitch is the segregation of the call signaling from the media, with media gateways used for bearer processing, and call-state/processing software on general purpose computers for signaling. Once again the Nirvana of a service and feature creation environment that is decomposed of the call processing element was sought.

Check out this quote from Jan. 24th, 2000

"The primary value of softswitches is they allow service providers to quickly roll out new services without involving switch vendors in the process. That is why softswitches create such promising opportunities for service providers to quickly ramp up their Internet revenues."

Here's a hum-dinger titled - Softswitch Fever: The Bedrock for Next-Gen Services - Technology Information Telecommunications, Jan, 2000 by Doug Allen

" Of all the elements that will make up the new public network, softswitches may be the most important. Softswitches play a crucial role in converged services, end-user control and third-party application integration--attributes that require many changes to the infrastructure."

The advanced intelligent networks (AIN) has been around since the '80s, when proprietary code and lack of vendor support sank it. This time around, softswitches have generated major hype--and some real-world deployment. Level 3 and Global Crossing have announced major IP telephony initiatives using the technology; 22 vendors have announced or introduced softswitch products of one stripe or another; and the International Softswitch Consortium debuted earlier this year to address time-to-market issues for its impressive roster of members."
So I know what you have to be thinking here….with this being the second attempt to reach the ultimate goal for the operator surely with lessons learned, the goal will reached. Well not so fast.

Back in 1999, the International Softswitch Consortium came up with the model for the softswitch architecture. The goal was to distribute the embedded features of existing circuit switches into multiple, discrete elements for the more efficient processing and handling of calls across converged voice and data networks. Beyond the immediate goal of offloading dial-up Internet traffic from circuit switches, the softswitch architecture was envisioned to be the new service creation and delivery engine for voice networks for years to come.

The fundamental problem with centralized softswitch architectures is that too much capability and control is centralized in the Media Gateway Controller, which has to be heavily involved in just about every transaction—from bearer path routing decisions to signaling to feature delivery. Making matters worse, the closed and proprietary platforms offered by most vendors not only create centralized models ill-suited for subscriber service creation and delivery, they also dramatically limit how and when service providers can deliver new features and services to their subscribers.

Enter IMS - I recently got back in touch with my college roommate. I haven't seen nor heard from the guy in over 12 years, and then when surfing the Internet, I stumbled across his name and contact information. He founded a company that specialized in Rebranding. I wasn't familiar with the term, but once he explained it to me, I understood. In the world of Telecom, we have some very creative "rebranders" floating around. See if the quotes below sound familiar.

From Oct 2004 "(for) operators there are benefits of introducing the IMS architecture today. On longer term, IMS enables a secure migration path to an all-IP architecture that will meet end-user demands for new enriched services."

As far as I am concerned, there is are redesign efforts taking place now for 2 main reasons. First we are realizing that the initial generation of packet gateways and the infrastructure that supported them have seen their day in the limelight, and need to be put to pasture. The days of providing a means to facilitate a bridging mechanisms between the Circuit and Packet worlds are dying. The "TDM-hop" that was the defacto standard carriers and enterprises used to pass voice calls is seen as archaic. It's a logical evolution, but an evolution nontheless, and this means the days of the circuit/packet gateway are numbered. The second reason telecom professionals are in the midst of a "redesign" of their infrastructure is due to their ingestion of copious amount of the proverbial "koolaid" being offered by the vendor community in the form of IMS propaganda. I was on a conference call today with a vendor pitching their wares, and the first slide after basic introductions was "We are IMS-ready!" What in tarnation does that even mean?

Yogi Berra-ism #3 - "You can observe a lot by watching"

This post of Richard Stastny's is one that I am going to print off and tape onto my desk.

Richard provides a historical perspective that must be kept in mind when revisiting the architecture of carrier networks:

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First some lessons from the past:

* Walled gardens are very successful for some time, but do not last.

* Proprietary solutions are also successful for some time, but they are either replaced by an open standard, or they evolve to a de-facto standard

* Open systems (open source) are lasting and getting more and more successful.

* IETF standards are more successful then others

* End-to-end systems (the Internet) with distributed intelligence are replacing centralized Intelligent Networks

* It is essential that third parties may add functions

* Simplicity wins, also usability.

* The ultimate end-to-end system is P2P

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There's much wisdom in these words, and the point I focus on the most is that "Simplicity wins, also usability." I find, as I explore some of the finer points of the IMS framework, that simplicity is not at the forefront of those that conceived the concepts. This is not to say that it's a trivial task to create a signaling plane for real-time sessions on an IP network. It's more the case that owning and using that signaling plane must not be an afterthought, but a focal point from inception.

Yogi Berra-ism #4 - "If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be "

Adam "voiploser" Uzelac