Submitted by acohill on Sun, 10/29/2006 - 09:37
If there was one thing everyone was talking about at the annual Rural Telecommunications Congress conference, it was open service provider networks. My talk discussed why they work financially (demand aggregation, across a whole community or an entire region, really pays dividends--literally). But vendors were also talking OSPN systems, and it is great to see systems coming into the marketplace that have been designed specifically for communitywide broadband use.
There are some basic priniciples that define a true open access system:
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The ability to have multiple service providers offering services, with more than one provider in each category (e.g. three Internet access providers, three TV providers, four VoIP providers, and so on), with each provider using their own IP address space on the network.
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The ability to automatically provision services end to end on the network. This means customers subscribe via a Web interface, and that seconds after ordering, the service is available in that home or business--no human intervention required. This is extremely important, as it is the only way these networks scale up efficiently to serve tens of thousands of customers.
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The ability to support more than the old-fashioned "triple play" of voice, video, and data. An open access network should be able to support dozens of services, including electric meter reading, network back up services, specialized gaming services, telemedicine and telehealth services, video on demand, and much more.
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The ability to simply and easily change or adjust service parameters like bandwidth to meet changing customer demand. Bandwidth for a particular service should be something that can be adjusted via a point and click interface, giving a service, as just one example, any level of bandwidth between 10 kilobits and 100 megabits. Additonally, service variables like Quality of Service (QoS) should also be adjustable simply and easily, based on demand.
It is an exciting time for communities. We finally have the broadband systems to compete in the global economy, and not only that, we now know how to build and pay for them.