Telecoms Evolution from "Silo" to "Application Converged"

Telecom convergence had became a very popular and common words in telecoms industry. Service providers, vendors and standardization body had always coming out with various suggestion and solution to reduce the CAPEX ( capital expenditure) and also OPEX ( operational expenditure ) . Telecoms technology continuously changing and evolving everyday in the area of transport approach (TDM, VoIP) , protocol handshake (H.323, IS41, MAP, SIP) and etc.

Why Silo based deployment model exist?

3 separate silo application of different type of network

There is various type of telecoms network exist in current telecom eco-systems such as wireline network, wireless network (GSM, CDMA) and IP Network ( IMS, NGN ). Each of them having thier own predefine protocol hand-shake and transportation medium, thus each service creation or application deployment consist of the detail network protocol handling to ensure the functionality of the service across the network. No doubts, the cost of maintaining various service creation and application will be increase and become expensive when come to customization The result of the silo based deployment will increase the operators or service providers CAPEX and OPEX .

Towards Application and Service Converged ( Parlay or ASC )?

When Telecoms meet IT, this is where the convergence come in and few infrastructure concept had been adopted such as SDP ( Server Delivery Platform ) and IMS ( IP Multimedia Subsystems ). The emerge of SDP is to cut down the complexity of service creation and application to various type of network by providing the network abstraction without knowing the details of the core networks flow and functionality.

Parlay Gateway in the position of Service Delivery Platform

Parlay / Parlay X gateway came in to serve the central point of network resource management as well as network abstraction to the service creation and application that deployed in the SDP systems.

The maturity of the Parlay Gateway deployment is still on the evaluation by the community. On the other hands, some may think that the deployment of Parlay Gateway will incurre another silo and add on CAPEX at the network layer. Another party may think Parlay Gateway doesn't address the legacy IN ( Intelligent Network) application.

ASC as the ultimate solutions?

AppTrigger Application Session Controller for the support of legacy network

AppTrigger, a telecoms solution company had come out the idea of Application Session Controller (ASC). The ASC will be sitting in the middle of application and the core network layer by providing a unified data session controller across various network e.g. TCAP ( wireless network), SIP ( IP-Network ) and INAP ( wired line network ) as well as other legacy network.

Similarity and Conclusion
Both Parlay and ASC serve the similarly which to provide the network abstraction to the applications and services creation. In order to converge various network systems would need some time and redefine the standard API, besides the practicality and business use case would also need to be considered.

One things for sure for telecoms service provider and vendor would need to find their way to maintain single service creations logic e.g. (Location Base Services as well as Caller RingTone) regardless GSM networks, IMS based SIP network or fix line network.

Thus a unified session application handshake protocol would be needed and network specific enabler (plugin model) need to exist to achieve the real convergence environment.


resources and link:-
AppTrigger Application Session Controller
App Trigger 1st IN based systems intergrate with IMS implementation
Parlay Group