NEW YORK-It was just this year that the camel’s nose of wireless intelligent networks appeared under the mobile communications’ tent, and it is not expected to rise to its full height until the dawn of the new millennium in 2001.
A creature of technology to be embraced, not feared, it will join forces with its companion, the Internet Protocol backhaul technologies under development for landline carriers. Together, WIN and IP promise to propel communications to an entirely new stage of evolution, one that could level the playing field between large and small wireless carriers.
Fortunately for mobile telecommunications providers, their landline counterparts, which provide essential call origination and termination functions, have had IN capabilities for the past decade. These made roaming possible as the first manifestation of a WIN-based service for wireless customers.
The wireline environment proved more hospitable to early development of coherent standards for intelligent networks because of characteristics that set it apart from wireless. The location of a call in a fixed-line system is easy to identify, and wireline telecommunications is unencumbered by the proliferation of radio-frequency standards present in wireless communications.
Several industry participants also attributed the delay in WIN deployment to a proliferation of standards-setting bodies, possibly engendered by the competing interests of various equipment vendors. Those interviewed who share that view include: Peter Gaylord, PrePay Billing product manager for Corsair Commun-ications Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.; Ragu Gurumurthy, a principal of Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc., New York; and Grant Wakelin, president of ADC NewNet’s software division, Shelton, Conn. ADC provides short message service centers and over-the-air programming compatible with the three main RF standards.
“There are probably 12 to 15 standards-setting bodies out there. It used to be that companies competed based on features and functions. Now, they compete on standards, trying to get their own put through,” Wakelin said.
“The opposite argument is that this is good, healthy debate.”
The concerns of individual carriers about revealing to competitors what WIN-based services they are most interested in also has stymied standards development, particularly for billing, which would seem to be essential, said Kathy McEwen, product manager of wireless intelligent networks for Nortel Networks, Richardson, Texas. Consequently, equipment manufacturers have to develop proprietary means by which carriers can bill customers for those services charged on a per-use basis.
“It’s in the carriers’ interest to have vendors build to standards (to allow for) interoperability. But time to market and keeping up with massive subscriber growth are essential, so sometimes you just can’t wait for standards to be set,” said Jack Kozik, intelligent network architecture director for Lucent Technologies Inc., Murray Hill, N.J.
Therefore, building in backward compatibility in the face of standards uncertainty is part of the job of hardware and software infrastructure vendors, he said.
Furthermore, “standards generally will tend to be the lowest common denominators that only apply to the base architecture, although this is a big improvement over the prior patchwork,” said Margaret Biner, global telecommunications practice director for Ronin, a Princeton, N.J., market strategy consulting firm.
“To add complexity to confusion, the (pending) standards will principally govern [third-generation wireless], and not all carriers will opt for 3G.”
However, Wakelin noted that existing carriers in many countries, and not just the former government monopolies recently privatized, will get preference in purchasing third-generation spectrum. The resulting avoidance of a bidding war that otherwise would occur will spur 3G deployment, he said.
WIN Interim Standard 41-D already has allowed for services like virtual private networks and calling name caller identification, McEwen said.
“For North America, WIN phase one was just published (as a standard) in the April-May time frame, and various vendors are now releasing infrastructure for short messaging services,” she said.
“Phase two has been split into several parts, with prepaid standards expected to be finalized in October. Standards for free phone (toll free), premium (900 number) and location-based services are expected at different times next year.”
WIN-based prepaid services likely will be the next “killer application” after short message service, said Kozik of Lucent, Gaylord of Corsair and Wakelin of ADC NewNet.
“Scalability is a big factor. Traditional adjunct-based prepaid requires several programmable switches, extra voice ports and other redundant hardware to the [mobile switching center],” Gaylord said.
“In a WIN-based architecture, you do the same thing with just IS-41 messages.”
As wireless intelligent networks standards and services advance, Internet Protocol technology for wireline networks is proceeding at a pace on a parallel track.
“In the wireless space, as carriers begin to offer enhanced services, they are dependent on the types of features available on wireline. IP has huge implications for wireline and its use in the wireless infrastructure for backhaul,” said Gurumurthy of Booz-Allen Hamilton.
“The biggest challenge is that, when we move to fixed-mobile convergence and customers want one (phone) number, how do carriers use and transfer [Signal Transfer Point] information back and forth between wireless and wireline?”
Lucent’s Kozik concurred, saying that the key is to make sure the same wireless intelligent network protocols carried over Signaling System 7 also can be carried over Internet Protocol.
“Everyone’s talking about it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some are working on it,” he said.
Today, a transitional environment is developing in which gateways are providing translation services between IP’s packet-based technology and the public switched telephone networks’ circuit-switched technology, said Ken Osowski, vice president of marketing and business development for IPeria Inc., Wakefield, Mass. IPeria is one such bridge builder, he said.
“Hybrid applications that cross the two worlds already are here because they are in demand, like Internet alerting of stock trades to your pager or cell phone,” he said.
As competitive exchange carriers, like Level 3, build voice-over-IP networks, “these will be good for regional wireless carriers if they can use the data networks transparently for roaming and other IN services,” Osowski added.
Transmission Control Protocol-Internet Protocol “has been identified as hugely beneficial for reducing the cost of transport from the cell sites back to the switch and from the switch to the IN platform,” said Nortel’s McEwen.
“The [Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers] and the [International Telecommunication Union] are promulgating standards, which are not totally committed to and formalized yet, that would provide handshake capability between IP and IN,” Ronin’s Biner said.
While new landline competitors likely will start from scratch with packet-based IP networks, Wakelin of ADC NewNet said he believes there will be deployment of hybrid landline circuit-switched and IP packet-switch networks for a good, long time among incumbent operators.
Overall, over the longer term, Biner said she expects to see “considerably more structure than we see now at the base level architecture, but don’t look for complete convergence until [fourth generation]. Ultimately, a converging standard will prevail that won’t be promulgated by regulatory bodies but will be a populist one based on performance, customer demands, what’s possible and what’s economical.”
Besides reducing transport costs for wireless calls, the convergence of WIN and IP also will open up the wireless world to a host of computer softwar
e developers not now involved in this sector, McEwen said.
Sun Microsystems Inc., for example, has used Telephony Application Programming Interface Protocols to incorporate parameters for wireless communications into its Java programming language. Standardization of Application Programming Interfaces at various layers of a communications protocol stack provides a uniform way to write applications.
