For our members and associates, the CMA and Ofcom notched up a huge success in July 2006.   A packed meeting brought together enterprise users, including utility companies, to enable the operators to explain the impacts of their Next Generation investments.  For BT this was the very first time they had exposed their 21C network to the UK’s largest customers.

 The operators have, of course, been working for some time in their own forum to explore issues of interoperability.   Apart from operators like Thus (for whom ‘next’ means ‘current’), most Telco’s have plans to rid themselves of pre-IP infrastructures, and all ISP’s, to some degree, have to be aware of the planned changes in BT’s wholesale services. 

The utility companies, represented by their network service managers, explained the challenges of adapting to this all-IP world.  It’s good news, I guess, that the Telco’s and Ofcom are now aware that planned (but variable) latencies are beyond the design tolerance of the utilities’ critical systems.   It’s less than good news that no-one has yet found a solution to the nightmare scenario of cascading power outages where 50 milliseconds makes a world of difference.  Nor does it seem to be very helpful that the stock response is that ISDN really wasn’t intended to be used like that. 

However, the July event did have one entirely positive outcome.  It opened the eyes of some operators to the real concerns of their customers.  There is now a very constructive dialogue between CMA, BT and Ofcom.  As a direct result of this CMA meeting, BT has now put its CPE compatibility testing results in the public domain and the operators, collectively, have issued their first press release on the Cardiff 21CN trial. 

For CMA members this 4-year transition to all-IP networks and the demise of the familiar PSTN and ISDN is a major topic.  We have two further events planned.  On 24th October members will again join with Ofcom for an update seminar with the operators.   Then on 14th November we are holding a ‘Focus Day’ on future networks and services.  This second event widens the field to include presentations from companies such as Cisco, Dimension Data, Telindus, Ovum and Thomson-Cirpack.    

Ovum will present a market assesment of customer realities and, from France, Cirpack will bring us up to speed on the continental experience of operators like Free Iliad and the blurring of lines between Telco’s and Corporate ventures now that both, in effect, will be operating private and interoperable IP networks. 

At our meeting in July it was all too apparent that when Ofcom spoke of consultation with ‘the industry’ it was a narrowly drawn definition that did not obviously include much of the multi-layered ecosystem of suppliers, systems integrators and Tertiary Telco’s – for that is how we might now describe the larger corporate and public sector networks.   

The commonality of all-IP systems suggests that, apart from scale economies, the only sustainable differentiators between Telco and Corporate networks will be in the management expertise to plan and operate them and the extent to which they are bundled with relevant services.    Welcome to the next generation of communications management.

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First published in NetworkingPlus October 2006