Triple-Play Service Deployment

But the launch of triple-play services requires that traditionally “best-effort” data
networks evolve into highly scalable and resilient infrastructures to ensure a high
quality experience (QoE). The introduction of broadcast and video on demand
services creates a situation in which bandwidth and CoS requirements to each
subscriber can swing wildly, while QoS must remain constant. For example,
ensuring that a high definition video stream doesn’t eat up bandwidth required for
an ongoing voice call is critical.
The inherent difficulty of deploying combined voice, data, and video services to
subscribers, the relative novelty of network platforms, and the fact that standards
for these platforms and technologies are still being hammered out, all make
ensuring interoperability among platforms a primary technical challenge for
triple-play service providers.
On the voice side, ensuring interoperability among softswitches, media gateways,
application servers, and signaling gateways, as well as provisioning voice features,
such as Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, and Caller ID, along with subscriber CPE,
remains a challenge, even though protocols such as SIP and H.248 have evolved
and matured. On the video side, still a relatively new technology for some service
providers, ensuring interoperability among multiple headend devices and/or the
headend devices of their content partners plus IGMP-capable routers, DSLAMs,
VOD, middleware, and conditional access servers and software poses a challenge
just within the video delivery network itself.
The most formidable challenges reside in the subscriber’s home, including
ensuring that in-home wiring has the capability to support multiple services, and
ensuring that the IP set top box (STB) works with a residential gateway or
broadband router and can ping the middleware servers for OS and EPG upgrades.
Subscribers fully expect that if there are problems with the in-home wiring, the
operator will send a technician to resolve that problem at little to no cost to them.
But if the operator has the means to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue without
rolling a truck, they will see a tremendous decline in the total cost of ownership of
their fledgling triple-play networks.
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