To remain competitive in the new telecom environment, all types of communication service providers are rapidly adopting Internet protocol technologies.  The older public switched telephone network (PSTN) providers are incorporating IP into their networks to lower costs and deliver improved services.  Wireless carriers are moving towards third-generation mobile system (3G) technologies to attract consumers with new multimedia services.  The pure voice over IP (VoIP) carriers are competing against traditional carriers by providing low-cost long distance voice carried over the public Internet along with sophisticated Web applications.  With increasing competition for voice in the wired world and slower acquisitions of new customers in wireless, carriers must contend with the problem of declining average revenue per user (ARPU) for their voice services.  This challenge faces carriers of all kinds—new entrants as well as providers with deep roots in the PSTN. 

While next-generation networks (NGNs) promise rich applications that will eventually offset the decline in voice revenue, today’s carriers must support IP as well as their legacy networking technologies.  Among service providers, business success is often tied to how fast market strategies can be changed to meet competitive pressures and take advantage of new opportunities.  To capture markets and create critical mass, rapid creation and execution of new services has become a necessity.  Given the way applications are currently deployed and the complexity of their interaction in continuously evolving networks, new services deployments are difficult, costly, and limit the service provider’s ability to drive ARPU and reduce churn.   

1.1.1 A New Approach: the ASC

Application Session Controllers (ASCs) are an important new approach to providing efficient and cost-effective application connectivity, application/session call control and the ability to mediate application mash-ups in a mixed networking environment.  Compared to the current application connectivity options, ASCs promote cost savings and introduce incremental revenue opportunities to a service provider’s network.  ASCs also preserve the investment in current revenue-producing IN (Intelligent Network) applications by enabling inter-working with next-generation network build-outs. 

This white paper explores the cost benefits and revenue enhancing opportunities of utilizing an ASC network element to provide the call/session control and connectivity needed to manage application interaction in the evolving network.   

2.1 The Challenges of Today's Solutions

Service providers are paying the price for the lack of cohesion between the application and network/control layer.  It has limited their ability to profit financially from their data and voice network and to leverage an ecosystem of developers and innovators.   

To move beyond the traditional single application to single network connectivity model, service providers are looking to the Internet model of application deployment as the key to future successes.  With the Internet’s communities of developers using standardized Web technologies to rapidly introduce new applications, the Internet is able to give consumers a continuing stream of sticky applications.  Among them are social networking, on-demand video downloads, instant messaging, and traditional voice-centric services.  Unfortunately, the service provider community faces a key limitation in creating new applications:  it is the inherent limits of application connectivity.  This limitation has an impact on applications and results in cost inefficiencies, time-to-market challenges, and lost revenue opportunities.  Today’s solutions are ad-hoc and unorganized, and they result in slow deployments cycles, unnecessary application stovepipes, and the inability to bundle and combine services to empower their subscribers and generate new revenue.  Ultimately, fewer new applications mean lower revenue per subscriber.   

The term application has sometimes been misapplied and used to describe underlying core technology, such as session initiation protocol (SIP), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), eXtensible markup language (XML), and service-oriented architecture (SOA).  A better approach is to categorize the telecom marketplace applications as:   

·        network applications — including fraud detection, roaming, number portability;   

·        enhanced services applications — voice mail, interactive voice response (IVR), toll free, conferencing; 

·        data applications — service management system (SMS) and multimedia messaging system (MMS); and 

·        multimedia applications — such as streaming and audio.   

Each of these types of applications depend on different networks that use different, yet inefficient deployment models.  For example, the voice network’s enhanced services represent an earlier software programming effort by the PSTN to increase ARPU.  This extended services software was developed in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s.  It was tightly tied to the underlying network elements (see Appendix), which resulted in IVR applications that worked for one vendor’s network element but could not be easily or cost-effectively moved to another network.  

2.1.1 Approaches Presently Used for Adding New Applications

To implement sophisticated revenue-generating applications and combine them with traditional services or other voice and data networks, service providers need a cohesive network element that manages interactions between the applications and the evolving network.  By looking at how the application layer and the network is presently managed, Insight Research identified four ....

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