It's All About Integration

Posted: 04/2000

It’s All
About Integration
By James R. Dukart

In today’s telecom world, it’s all about integration. Carriers and customers are sending a growing concoction of network traffic out over the wires and airwaves, using an alphabet soup of transport protocols.

Voice and data travel over the same circuits, using anything from frame to IP and from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to ATM to communicate. On the receiving end, customers demand a single pipe or connection serving all traffic, and competitive carriers who want customer business must be able to provide that single pipe seamlessly, accurately and quickly.

Enter integrated access devices
(IADs), the best friend of the carrier in need of integration.

IADs come in a few different shapes and sizes and from a variety of vendors, but in general they are pizza-box or shoe-box shaped devices that sit at a network location or on customer premises, taking in various forms of traffic and passing it out again over a single circuit.

The current IAD market, according to market watcher Dataquest Inc.
(http://gartner5.gartnerweb.com) is upwards of $800 million, with compound annual growth rates of at least 10 percent. The overall market for
IADs, says The Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com)
should top $1 billion within the next two to three years.

IADs are particularly hot for two overlapping types of users–competitive carriers eager to roll out new services, and small to medium-sized businesses with growing voice and data needs.

In many cases, although carriers may own and operate the IADs, they sit on customer premises, granting carriers and customers additional benefits besides traffic integration. Chief among these are: better bandwidth allocation, greater control over network elements, fast access to new services and convenient migration paths from circuit-switched to packet-based networks.

Dave Gunning, vice president of marketing for IAD vendor Integral Access Inc.
(www.integralaccess.com), says all these features are appealing to carriers who serve small and medium-sized enterprises.

“The carriers come in to us talking about their pain points, and one is how to deliver voice and high-speed Internet connectivity to this [small and medium-sized business] market,” Gunning says. “You go to small offices and they are surviving on legacy phone systems and dial-up connections to their local ISP.”

Integral Access’ flagship IAD product is the OUTburst SB, a device that Gunning says can deliver 24 simultaneous voice calls, 500 Kbit of committed information rate (CIR) data and best-effort data over a single T1 line.

Gunning says the device is specifically geared to run on a packet-based platform, offering carriers and end users myriad advantages over circuit-based TDM networks.

“We take the voice and data packets side by side and give them different priority in the way they use resources,” Gunning says.

This offers several advantages. One is dynamic bandwidth allocation–offering as much bandwidth as is needed for a task, rather than reserving the maximum amount and underutilizing circuits. An-other is the ability to attach different levels of security, redundancy or priority to different types of traffic, depending on the nature of the traffic and on how a carrier or enterprise prefers to handle it.

The ability to analyze and manage traffic at the “granular level” in a packet network, Gunning says, means carriers can offer a wider array of services to customers.

“We allow them to open up a catalog of products they can offer their customers,” he says. “They can offer platinum service for some things, gold or bronze for others.”

Alan Ellison is vice president for network services for one such carrier, Actel Integrated Communications
(www.actel.net). Actel uses IADs from Integral Access and other vendors to serve clients throughout the Southeastern United States.

Ellison says a typical IAD customer is an enterprise with between 12 and 30 voice lines that is beefing up its data needs. Prior to installing an IAD, he says, most of these enterprises run parallel voice and data networks. Combining traffic on a single circuit cuts costs and improves network manageability.

Actel’s system uses IADs connected to three of the company’s Lucent 5EEE switches located at various collocation sites. The devices take in TDM traffic and pass out voice and data that have been packeted.

Completely packeted intranetwork traffic lets the carrier dynamically allocate bandwidth, which, in turn, frees up network resources. The result is better control over the traffic currently on the network and faster deployment times for new customers, Ellison says.

Dave
Boulos, director of product management for Telco Systems (www.telco.com),
manufacturer of the Edgelink IAD product line, says an IAD speeds new line deployment and reduces demands on carrier resources dedicated to new line installs.

“They can turn on channels as needed, and do not need to deploy anyone for more installations,” Boulos says. “In the competitive carrier market, that can be a big help.”

An added advantage is that IADs not only mix voice and data traffic, they mix voice and data sales forces, he says.

“With one box that does more services, the folks that go out and sell data service are hand in hand with the people selling voice,” Boulos adds. “You get a better understanding of the overall customer needs that way.”

Migration and Control

“A typical service provider for the IAD market has proven to be more voice centric than data centric,” says Tim Saunders, director of enterprise network product management for IAD vendor ADTRAN Inc.
(www.adtran.com), maker of the ATLAS series of IADs for enterprises and Total Access systems for carriers.

He adds, service providers “are looking for something that provides a good migration path from TDM to a packet technology.”

One of ADTRAN’s newest products is its Total Access 850 system, which provides
IP/IPX routing supporting Frame Relay and PPP. It also offers foreign exchange office
(FXO) and foreign exchange service (FXS) interfaces for analog voice, DSX-1 for digital voice, V.35 for connecting with external routers or video-conferencing equipment, a
U-BRITE for BRI extension and an OCU DP for DDS extension.

In other words, it offers everything carriers need to migrate networks according to specific customer requirements, all done on a software basis and with little or no service disruption, Saunders says.

On the enterprise side, IADs offer cost savings and technology advantages in a number of ways. he continues. One is intelligent call routing based on incoming call prefix. That is, local calls can be routed to one service provider while long-distance calls are routed to another. This takes advantage of any special tariffs or volume discounts the enterprise holds.

Another way IAD use can cut costs is through oversubscribing circuits. Since it is rare that all phone lines and all data channels are in simultaneous use, an IAD allows you to channel multiple lines onto one circuit, using the device to find an open line and eliminate the need for separate telco phone circuits.

IAD use also offers carriers and enterprises increased control over network elements.

Motty
Anavari, senior product manager for IAD vendor RAD Data Communications Inc. (www.rad.com),
says the telecom market has placed a premium on network control, while making that control harder to achieve.

“Nowadays when you have a lot of
service providers, you don’t have a single location that can give you end-to-end connectivity,” Anavari says. “So control of your customer circuits and doing your own troubleshooting is essential.”

A service provider must know what is going on throughout its network in order to provide top-notch customer service, Anavari says.

Packet-based networks help, but carriers must understand that customers see the carrier as responsible for the entire network, including portions that are leased from partners, he adds.

If a partner has an outage, the carrier needs to know about it before customer sites are stricken.

“It is very embarrassing if the customer calls you up and says they have a problem before you know about it,” Anavari says.

Integral Access’ Gunning says it goes beyond simply knowing about potential network problems. IADs move network control closer to the customer, which is good for business.

“As the end customer, I should be able to change my committed rate of data,” Gunning explains. “I should be able to move my service for certain types of traffic from silver to gold level. I should be able to see all SLA [service level agreement] violations and carrier maintenance activity. I should have more access to and control over the network elements I am using.”

Keep It Simple

Access and control cannot be gained at the cost of ease of use. Gunning and Anavari say a key to customer and carrier acceptance of integrated access devices is they must be nonintrusive and easy to use.

“We put a lot of emphasis on remote management capability,” says Anavari. “The plug-and-play feature that we have entails sending a completely unconfigured device to a customer location. Once the unit is hooked up, the operators from the network center can configure it with ease.”

Gunning adds, “We call it zero-touch administration. You go out and install it once, and that’s it.”

Ease of use is critical to competitive carriers, because most CLECs “do not have the same army of people you had at the ILECs,” he says. That means competitive carriers must have equipment and devices that require minimal administration and can be installed and provisioned with as little manual input as possible.

“We have built these things with the horsepower to migrate over to packet-based services without a forklift of equipment,” says Telco Systems’ Boulos. “The enterprise area has the highest growth rate, but for the most part service providers are leasing these boxes out to their customers. We have to give them full flexibility on both the voice and data side.”

On the customer side, ease of use might be even more crucial. “The customer does not think about an IAD, about converged voice and data,” says Anne Tetterton, chief marketing officer of Actel. “The person probably has a voice line and a dial-up Internet account, and they are thinking ‘somehow I just need to get out of this so that when I am on the phone I also have Internet access.’ Carriers, she says, need the ability to go in and install a simple, unobtrusive device that will let customers optimize networks without installing new lines, changing dialing patterns or re-working their calling plans.

“We don’t need to educate them on what is behind the curtain, we just need to provide a solution,” Tetterton says. “Integrated access services are simply an enabler to help them do their jobs better.”

James R. Dukart is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis. He can be reached at
[email protected].