Mediated Reality

By Tara Seals

As the whirlwind race for the presidency showed us, we are highly dependent on the media as our link to the world; these days, whistle-stop tours don’t come through most towns. Similarly, mediation systems are a key informational link to what’s happening in carrier networks. And just as journalism has evolved from “reporting what happened” to setting the agenda for public opinion, mediation is evolving from simple data collection to service-enablement for IP communications and content services.

Mediation has become much more than a way to turn raw switch information into usable data for billing purposes. Over time, that basic translation function has evolved into the aggregation and automation of network information for backoffice systems, pre-billing error correction and, with the advent of IP services, the collection of information from a variety of networks using many protocols. Finally, active mediation - real-time record processing when a user interacts with a service rather than after the event - has become the standard for tackling convergent networks.

Now, industry sea change is driving a rash of development in the mediation space. Third-party broadband-based applications, content and richmedia services will change the landscape of communications within the next couple of years, particularly in the consumer space as IP-enabled cablecos and RBOCs begin to look to integrated triple-play offers to differentiate themselves.

“One benefit of [adding VoIP to our portfolio] is the possible new features,” says Mike Pacifico, director of marketing at Cox Communications Inc., citing an example that builds on Cox’s capabilities as a video provider in creating integrated offers. “We’re looking at the ability to use [a] remote control with caller ID and call management over the television. Consumers can choose to send calls to voice mail or let it ring and pick it up,” he says. “So we can build onto our bundle in a richer way, for the Bundle 2.0.”

Industry consensus says such offers could show up in 2005, and certainly in 2006.

For now, wireless operators are farthest ahead in the content race with third-party information available on handsets and services like ringtones and video mail proliferating. Interactive gaming and music downloads have been successes on the wired side. While it has yet to become widespread, “high-performance digital content delivery is most important today to operators of high-traffic Web sites. But as broadband access becomes more pervasive, all types of organizations will relish the delivery of video, voice and other forms of rich media over these ‘fast lanes,'” says Michael Howard, principal analyst and founder at Infonetics Research.

PUTTING CONTENT IN CONTEXT

This evolution in services requires a shift in service providers’ business models and the back-office systems that support them. One big underlying issue: Unlike the TDM world, where the service is tied to the network, IP creates an abstraction between services and the access and transport piece. More changes come as content, new applications, micro-transactions and third parties hit the scene.

“There is now a clear separation between the value of the application (voice, video, content and instant messaging, etc.) and that of the network by which it is delivered,” explains Tom Kershaw, vice president of VoIP services at VeriSign Inc. “In traditional wireline voice and, to a large extent, also in wireless, the network access is bundled with the application. And in most cases the network-access package was the larger component in the overall cost equation. With IP, you purchase access, which gives you access to a set of applications, some of which will be free and some of which will be paid.

This really puts a premium on value-added content and innovation [because] the willingness to pay will be proportional to the uniqueness and value of the content. Traditional telcos, [whose] models were based on metered usage (time and distance), are not used to charging based on differential value.”

Because of this decoupling of network and application, the modus operandi becomes billing for certain transactions, regardless of bandwidth utilization. “In the ’90s they thought people would pay for usage,” says Chris Couch, ACE*COMM Corp’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. ACE*COMM’s N*VISION convergent mediation solution manages network data in real time, with network-usage data warehousing for instant access to usage statistics, customer profiles, quality-of-service metrics, access costs and business performance. It will introduce real-time charging capabilities in the near future.

“That really hasn’t come about how they thought. Instead, you pay $39 per month for unlimited access, and you can get voice through Vonage for $29.99 - all you can eat. Video on demand is $2 to $3 per purchase, so theres not a notion of paying for better quality of service, except in interactive gaming, where you need resiliency and low latency. You need a sophisticated network to do that. But people aren’t explicitly paying for it.”

Content and applications also drive a new, user-centric servicedelivery model. “How [do you] deliver services tailored for the individual instead of being bundled for the masses?” asks Jay Thomas, vice president of marketing at Narus Inc., which makes an online mediation platform that can capture data from any network element. “The ability to work with third-party content providers, so mediation can see that this person is using this [service] and also this service, is critical.”

As an example, imagine a couple in a restaurant deciding what to do after dinner. Their service provider pushes movie times, movie trailers, a list of close-by theatres and driving directions to their wireless handset. Besides the actual Internet access charged for by the operator, “The monies flow to many. It’s a $1.10 cost to the [user] that gets spread between about seven partners,” explains Keith Wolters, senior director of IP solutions at Convergys Corp., whose Infinys platform contains a mediation piece that can settle up content expenses and revenue streams for account balance accuracy to prevent fraud before transactions are allowed to occur. “It’s a realtime rating process, to make sure everyone gets what they’re owed.

That’s the future. And at some point things like QoS will enter in for video or audio streams, so there will be rating based on quality. And video telephony is coming as we evolve to a common appliance.” Mediation will need to tease out the various elements and parts of the service delivery and deliver appropriate information to the appropriate back-office system - depending on the application, device and user involved. And it all has to happen in real time.

As noted, there are more players in the content value chain. Operators partner with content aggregators, who in turn partner with a number of content providers. “CNN offers a free Web site. But if you subscribe, you can watch video streams. Or you can subscribe to ESPN for play snapshots,” says Wolters.

“But realistically, I’m not going to spend money here, money there. As a content aggregator, they can offer 10 streams from here and 10 from there, for a monthly fee. As a consumer, I want to pay one bill, hopefully to the operator, for the service.”

In another shift with mediation implications, VoIP changes voice into an application. “Making voice an application accessible by networks, rather than a network accessible by applications, will lead to voice enablement of virtually everything we do,” says Kershaw.

“Previously, it’s been the other way around; we have tried to add applications to voice. With VoIP, we will add voice to applications. The power of that statement is something we will look back on 20 years from now the way we look back on computing and mobility today.” Another example of mediation’s new role is parental control. User demographic information may be held at a service provider database, but a content provider probably doesn’t have a user profile in its system.

So partners can provide classification of restricted content for certain downloads, and the mediation system can compare it to the user profile the operator maintains and allow or deny the download accordingly.

This per-transaction, user-centric vision of the future produces a need for mediation to interact not just with the various disparate IP network elements and the billing system, but also with user profiles, partner-settlement engines, credit or debit accounting platforms and other areas of the BSS to collect, process and provide the correct information for accurate, real-time rating.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW, RIGHT NOW

A slew of back-office complexity will come with these new consumer services, sparking innovation in the mediation space. “A challenge with third-party applications is making sure those aren’t being double- rated,” says David Sharpley, senior vice president of marketing and product management at MetaSolv Software Inc., which provides a convergent mediation solution called Network Mediation. “Micro-charging, prepaid data, content-based billing, it all increases the complexity and the burden on mediation systems to [perform aggregation and correlation for data integrity].”

Another challenge is in handling settlement for micro-transactions. Take the movie information scenario: A $2 charge could be split among several partners on the back end.

“We realized we couldn’t just interface with a content provider and update the customer’s balance,” says Thomas Peterson, director of the IT business line at Intec Telecom Systems plc. Intec’s new multiservice mediation solution, Inter-mediatE v5, integrates with the recently acquired Digiquant Dynamic Charging Platform to allow real-time and prepaid billing for thirdparty content services. “We’re talking about a lot of low-cost items.”

So low, in fact, that most legacy systems can’t rate them. “With micro-transactions, the biggest problem is that the cost/charge falls below the threshold and doesn’t make it economical for a bank or credit card company to process the payment,” says Malcolm Lewis, executive vice president of product management and marketing at UshaComm, maker of Pegasus, a convergent mediation and service-control solution that provides integration into downstream applications such as billing, fraud, interconnect and data warehousing. “Therefore these transactions tend to be pushed back into the debit space for the operator to manage on the subscriber pre- and postpaid accounts. The problem is ensuring that the service provider has access to the payment mechanism, especially where content providers are also involved. This means there is a necessity for flexible sharing and rules mediated according to volume and time, so everyone gets a fair slice of the cake.

Also where content mediation is involved, traditional retail billing platforms are not designed to manage these business models, and an independent settlements platform is required.” Speaking of finances, risk is inherent in the content supply chain, leading to the need for mediation to take on an accounting role, too.

“There are three big drivers [to overhaul mediation systems in light of content] from the operator side,” says Niclas Melin, marketing director for charging at Ericsson, which offers Multi-Mediation, a converged product. “They need to improve marketing to deliver the right services to the right users at the right time. They need cost efficiency to quickly integrate new nodes, change services on the fly and leverage legacy investments. And they need to affect financial risk management.”

This latter piece means that operators’ mediation systems need to be able to assess a user’s credit history, reserve money on a user account before the service starts, monitor ongoing sessions and then provide information to billing to deduct the charge. “Content providers will take their part of the revenue stream, regardless of whether the operator can collect from the user,” he notes.

Another layer of complexity is the extraction of information from many diverse network elements, protocols and devices. “There is a change in the underlying infrastructure toward wide and disparate network elements in IP; they’ve taken that Class 5 switch and broken it out,” says MetaSolv’s Sharpley. “There are different types of records that have to be collected and processed. That requires more aggregation and de-duping, and in different formats. You also have to take the information upstream and harmonize it with legacy types of interfaces.”

The biggest hurdle is standardization of the access networks and devices. “The delivery of content is dependent on the ability of the terminating device to be able to access and view that content,” explains VeriSign’s Kershaw. “With the Internet, standardization is largely overcome in that pretty much any PC can view any content that is plugged into the Internet. In telecoms - fixed and wireless - there are still big device dependencies. The same is true of VoIP devices, where the protocol and device capability directly determines accessible content.” VeriSign addresses the issue with its Jamba! platform, which allows device selection so it presents only content that is relevant to that device.

All of this can be done today, but often with a high level of customization for the service provider’s specific network characteristics. “Mediation acts as an adaptor to the elements, and as the network gets more complex, it’s more heterogeneous,” says Doug Miller, channel manager at Narus. “There are several gateways now; it’s not just [those from] Cisco [Systems Inc.] and Juniper [Networks Inc.].

So mediation providers write more and more adapters, and every install ends up being a custom-job shop, not mediation at all. But then it gets more complex with gateways and mobile infrastructure. Now mediation has to understand new versions of WAP, and iMode and “push-to-talk” [are] coming.” Avoiding customization and encouraging automation will be a key to success for operators. “The more I have to invest in on-boarding each application, the more the net return on each application must be,” says Kershaw.

“If my cost of adding an application is small, I can have more of them and still make a decent return. So automation of the integration of new content and applications is the key - and the most important value proposition of VoIP.”

One way to tackle the challenges is to increase intelligence in the network mediation piece. “Mediation can act as a service enabler,” says Couch. “Just as there are intelligent networking capabilities in service provider networks, there is logic encapsulated in the active mediation layer between IT and the network. So you can query how much something is going to be before you buy it, or provide service control logic for presence, on how to direct a call. It’s not clear how much will be encapsulated into that layer, but there is a lot of development around that.” Clearly, mediation has become more than data aggregation, or even real-time data mining.

Service providers are updating their infrastructures, and mediation providers are developing new capabilities every day as the market moves into a new realm driven by a change in the underlying network and a change in what people want to buy. “Content will be key going forward, and the value of mediation there is undeniable,” says Thomas. “These guys just can’t do what they want to do without it.”