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APRIL / MAY 2009

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Achieving a Crystal Clear View with Integrated Inventory

Laurie Spiegel, Director of Marketing, Telcordia

Driving capital spend in these tough economic times is the need to push ever more bandwidth-demanding information across the network. This is achieved in two fundamental ways: by plowing new fiber cables onto the landscape; and by leveraging new technologies that pump more data into existing fiber strands. Communications service providers (CSP) worldwide are investing billions on fiber and fiber-based technologies to support mobile backhaul, variations on fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment, Ethernet- and SDH/SONET-based enterprise services, and to augment core IP network transport.

Universal across each and every one of these scenarios is the need to accurately inventory the fiber assets and to relate those assets to all of the services they support. By providing an integrated view of the network, physical locations and logical assignments are linked. Provisioning and customer data are tied to network equipment. Efficient restoration is enabled from cable cuts to disaster recovery. Sporadic network faults can be traced to actual sites to determine if environmental factors are at play. Improvement in availability of data across the enterprise is enabled ─ from forecasting through to repair. And from a financial standpoint, CSPs who adopt this integrated, single-view approach should realize improvements in productivity and capital efficiency.

Let’s pick one scenario – say multi-play over FTTH – and uncover the need by examining how each of the high-speed internet, video, and voice services is delivered.

fiber-path

Two Dimensions of a Fiber Path: End-to-End and Cross-Section

Starting at the subscriber end, each service makes its way to its final destination, and at various points along the journey, is combined with their neighbors’ service, eventually traversing a metropolitan fiber cable and terminating on a broadband access node. To keep all of these services from jumbling together, each subscriber’s bundle is defined by a unique virtual path. From the broadband service access node, each unique service type such as high speed internet, is separated from the other services, and combined with all of the other high speed internet services coming from many homes and neighborhoods. To keep this high speed internet services package from jumbling with the voice services, the bundle is again defined by a unique virtual path and sent along its way across a fiber uplink through the core network to its ultimate destination – perhaps the internet service provider. This depicts the horizontal view of the fiber path, often described as the logical provisioned path across the network.

But the CSP also needs to have a crystal clear view of the service at every cross-section along the way in order to understand how the service relates to the network component that is underpinning its delivery. For example, service degradations or outages must be isolated to the exact cause in the network with pinpoint accuracy based on: physical location, fiber cable identification down to the fiber strand level, port assignment related to termination equipment, and virtual path assignment. Understanding how each of these components relates to each other and to the failed service plays a critical role in fault identification and timely resolution.

Telcordia offers an Integrated Inventory solution that is used by CSPs such as Level 3 Communications "to create a single source for inventory and ensure that inventory data is consistent from the physical implementation through the logical definition and fulfillment of capacity and products,” according to Nancee Ruzicka, Senior Research Analyst at Stratecast¹. “The strategy is to redefine the Level 3 architecture layer by layer such that the complexity of data and logic is built, quite literally, from the ground up."

layer-relation

Understanding the Relationship Between the Layers

With an integrated inventory approach, CSPs can address these critical requirements with a crystal clear view of the layers, bottom up in the way they are built, and top down in the way they are provisioned and maintained.

For Level 3 and others, the end goal is to leverage a federated and integrated inventory repository with a focus on the end customer – to reduce the time to turn up service by automating provisioning and by eliminating unnecessary truck rolls, and to quickly resolve problems by leveraging the multi-layer view to isolate and locate the issue. As Nancee Ruzicka reported, “Level 3 indicated that immediate process improvement was realized because underlying physical changes to the network are now fully correlated. Technicians no longer have to manually fill in gaps in the data.”

Whether the focus is on carrier business services, FTTH, or mobile backhaul, understanding the relationship of each component to adjacent components and across layers is the essential ingredient for success.

For more information about Integrated Inventory, please contact Laurie Spiegel at lspiegel@telcordia.com or downlad a new white paper, Integrated Inventory Unifies Network Management and visit our website to see a video.

1. From the recent report “Making the Network Work – Global Network Planning and Engineering Strategies”, OSS/BSS Global Competitive Strategies (OSSCS 10-01), Stratecast (a Division of Frost & Sullivan), January 2009.