NEW YORK-The promise of intelligent networks will be realized in their convergence with the world of the Internet, said Paul G. Florack, co-author of a recently published book, Wireless Intelligent Networking.
WIN has not succeeded in its ultimate goal of “freeing carriers from the grasp of switch vendors,” said Florack, who is director of product management and development at Illuminet Inc., Olympia, Wash.
“This never happened because carriers still have to pay tremendous amounts of money for triggers in their circuit-switched networks to give them the capabilities to do different things.”
The wireless intelligent network concept evolved to “put intelligence at a floating level around the network instead of at the switch because more and more people were saying it’s silly for phone companies to be tied into one (switch) supplier,” said Alastair Dodwell, vice president of sales and marketing for Open Telecommunications North America Inc., Seattle.
Signaling System 7, which includes intelligent network applications, “often is much more robust than IP for doing voice communications,” said Bill Dyer, director of new business ventures for Alcatel’s Intelligent Networks division, Plano, Texas.
“IP is less expensive than SS7 and less cumbersome and complex than SS7 equipment. You have Bell heads and Net heads, but even Net heads recognize the importance of SS7 and that IP can’t do it all.”
An SS7 link allows calls to go through to any of the world’s more than 1 billion phones; IP links today are far more limited in reach, said Jack Kozik, director of Architecture and E-Services for Lucent Technologies Inc., Naperville, Ill.
Created many years ago, wireless intelligent networking is primarily a signaling protocol that has succeeded in reducing carrier overhead by eliminating the need for a “switch in front of every entity and a database behind every entity,” said Ray Naeini, president of Intervoice-Brite Network Solutions Division, Dallas.
“IP has done a wonderful job of delivering data and Internet applications.”
The trick is to get WIN and IP to work together, each playing to its respective strengths. General Packet Radio Service, or 2.5-generation wireless, essentially is “a sophisticated switching” mechanism that routes voice calls to WIN and data communications to IP,” Naeini said.
“There are a lot of efforts in the industry to link WIN and IP. Gateways act as mediators, allowing you to launch a database query in SS7. The message goes through the embedded SS7 system, which is ubiquitous, is converted into an IP message that goes out through the IP world, which pulls in the information. We’re getting close to this,” Florack said.
“Services like voice access to data and information based on the location of the caller are examples where inter-working between WIN and IP would make things easier, faster and richer.”
Finding the nearest movie of your choice often is cited as the classic example of location-based information on demand that consumers find appealing. WIN now is linking with mobile Internet services to supply that kind of information even when the consumer does not know the correct ZIP code, as often is the case.
“If I have location data for the subscriber and want to link that to Moviefone, I could teach Moviefone to speak SS7, but it already knows how to speak IP,” Kozik said.
“Web pages use a different protocol from e-mail, but the Internet in the middle doesn’t try to force them to be the same. IP offers tools to let a lot of people glue a lot of different things together.”
Enabled by instant messaging and an IP interface to buddy lists, WIN could take advantage of presence management, or cognizance of a phone’s status and its owner’s location, as a means for executing interesting and useful functions, Kozik added.
“The service might be, `It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. Do you know where your parents are?’ It could also be used as a virtual dispatch service for businesses,” he said.
In Florack’s view, the average communications consumer is looking for noticeable but not revolutionary improvements in service quality and delivery. A golden glove handshake between WIN and IP would go a long way toward facilitating this goal.
“I personally am in the camp that doesn’t think carriers have yet maximized their revenues from 2G and 2.5G. While there are some things, like streaming video, they won’t be able to do without 3G, I am suspicious about the business case for 3G,” Florack said.
IP-based networks offer carriers the ability to provide a wider range of services in comparatively short order, Dodwell said.
American network operators view with an equal mixture of fear and anticipation the openness of the Internet and the ability of IP to facilitate third-party billing of wireless customers for goods and services, Florack said.
“Carriers fret that they’re just dumb pipes if everything is open and consumers can buy things from third parties. But it is shortsighted of carriers to think they will be able to think of every requirement and need of every end user,” he said.
Although IP telephony to personal computers is associated with inferior voice call quality and reliability, eventually it will offer wireless carriers opportunities to monitor and deliver levels of call quality based on different price plans, Dodwell said.
“As IP networks expand and more people use IP devices, one could argue that carriers could sample complete frequencies, and there is no reason they couldn’t offer CD (compact disk) quality,” he said.
“IP gives carriers more flexibility to offer different levels of service with different levels of guaranteed bandwidth and call quality.”
Today, there are no IP-enabled handsets able to transmit and receive Internet Protocol over radio-frequency signals, and the form factors of wireless communicators that can do so still are quite bulky, Dyer said. Nevertheless, wireless network operators are testing other aspects of IP.
“Some of the big backbone players have been very aggressive in IP. Wireless carriers are trying out IP in backhaul to get the dollar savings and to see how it works. If you look at some of the IP backhaul, there is SS7 encapsulated in IP,” he said.
“That is one of the giant first steps on the carriers’ part before they do a much wider deployment.”
An end-to-end IP network would go a long way to improve the speed of content delivery, Florack said.
IP started from the core of telecommunications networks, and it is now beginning its migration outward toward the edges, into handsets and private branch exchanges, Naeini said.
“SS7 won’t disappear anytime soon, and (full-scale) IP implementation is at least several years down the road,” Dyer said.
Dodwell said he believes the vision of a “packet-based world” will not arrive for many years.
Whatever their limitations, wireless intelligent networks still deliver high quality, and they blanket the globe. Economics will drive the prolonged transition from WIN to IP, Kozik said.
While both protocols inhabit heterogeneous telecommunications networks, developments will continue to make them both work increasingly well together until one supercedes the other.
