European MSOs Looking to Speed
Move to IPCablecom™

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By Fred Dawson
Principal, Dawson Communications

Please note: Andy Mullen of Cameron Consulting was misinterpreted in comments referring to progress on the IPCablecom standard. He was quoted as referring to the U.S. PacketCable standard as "basically unstable" when in fact he was referring to the ETSI IPCablecom standards-setting process.

European cable operators' efforts to put the IPCablecom™ platform to use in delivering packet voice services are moving onto what many hope will be a faster track to deployments following a year of ups and downs in the pursuit of a viable standard.

But there remain strong differences of opinion as to what route that fast track should take. By all accounts, the core components required for delivery of voice in IP format over cable systems in Europe as well as the U.S. are much closer to commercial viability than they were at the outset of 2002. What's missing in Europe is universal agreement on the baseline specifications that should comprise a cable-specific version of IPCablecom as well as a consensus on the best way to go about certifying that vendors are compliant with that standard.

The good news is that, with sufficient push from the demand side, these remaining issues are not likely to get in the way of commercial implementation of a European version of IPCablecom, which is the ITU-sanctioned standard largely based on the PacketCable™ specifications developed under the auspices of CableLabs® in the U.S. The standards-setting process received a huge boost earlier this year when, after just over a year of deliberations, the ITU, through the efforts of Study Group 9, issued 17 recommendations for the global application of IPCablecom specifications. But, with demand weakened by the overall financial state of the cable industry in Europe, there's no telling just how soon the disagreements on technical issues there will work themselves out.

There are two major fault lines running through the IPCablecom process in Europe, one delineating the differences between the cable community and the rest of the telecom industry and the other reflecting differences between the cable MSOs and their vendors. While the former has been a major factor in slowing down the standardization process within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the latter is largely a matter of friction built up from the stultifying effects of a market slowdown that has cut into capital valuations of cable companies and substantially undercut vendor revenue expectations. But it's clear that a little more harmony between operators and vendors would be beneficial to the aspirations of both sides.

Seen through the prism of expectations a year ago, there's no denying that an air of disappointment hangs over the cable industry's move to IP voice. Back then, operators were keen with anticipation that the aggressive commercial launch plans announced by Callahan Associates for its cable holdings in the North Rhine-Westphalia regions of Germany, now operating as ISH, would pave the way to rapid rollouts elsewhere. At the same time, there was hope that ETSI's pursuit of a European version of the ITU-sanctioned IPCablecom standard would quickly lead to an officially sanctioned environment for cable operators to work in as they dealt with the complex regulatory requirements surrounding rollout of voice services in various countries.

Right from the start things didn't go as planned at ISH, according to Callahan spokesman Chris McLaughlin. "Originally we expected our vendor consortium would deliver the components for voice over IP in the pre-Christmas timeframe, which would allow us to begin selling a package of high-speed Internet and telephony services in Westphalia and North Rhineland markets," he says. "But it turned out that the technology couldn't be made to work in that timeframe."

ISH had another problem as well, which was that, out of the 1.1-1.3 million homes passed by the upgraded portions of its HFC networks in the region, it only had direct, or what Germany refers to as "Level 4," control over the access portions of networks reaching about 200,000 customers. Elsewhere it had to deal with separate Level 4 providers either through buyouts or contractual arrangements if it was going to be able to make these new services available to customers, and this proved exceedingly difficult, McLaughlin says.

"We spent a huge chunk of time trying to conclude arrangements with Level 4 providers," McLaughlin explains. "But, to a greater or lesser extent, they were anticipating that (Liberty Media Chairman John) Malone was going to purchase Deutsche Telekom's cable holdings and that they would do better by waiting to sell out to him. So we were unable to connect through to most of the customers passed by our upgraded network."

As it turned out, Liberty withdrew its bid for the DT properties, in part because the government cartel oversight agency refused to allow the Level 4 players to sell out to Liberty, which contributed to a rapid devaluation of cable in Germany, including Callahan's properties. Meanwhile, on the technical front, McLaughlin says ISH experienced further delays as vendors struggled with software glitches in the transition to full implementation of IPCablecom, which is to say, an implementation using softswitch technology rather than relying on circuit switches via the V5.2 interface that supports extension of switched services into remote neighborhoods over digital loop carriers. The upshot of all this is that, as of mid-summer, ISH was serving fewer than 1,000 customers with VoIP service without any certainty that it would be able to scale to thousands of users if it decides to proceed with commercial rollouts.

"The combination of technical delays and German government inertia has put us up against the wall," McLaughlin says. "The question we have to ask is what to do about telephony when DT has such a strong reputation as a provider of reliable service." ISH definitely sees high-speed data as a way to gain a return on investments in its upgraded facilities, but it will have to be convinced that the technical and business case is there for telephony very soon if it is to proceed with voice as well. The position taken by ISH's new president, Andrew Sukawaty is "either it works or we'll junk it," McLaughlin says.

Vendors are reluctant to discuss issues raised by McLaughlin but insist that everything is going according to plan and on schedule from the technology side. "The network is functional and operational and was delivered on target," says Elaine Smiles, director of cable marketing at Nortel Networks, which, along with serving as network systems integrator for the ISH facilities, is supplying the softswitch or CMS (call management server), audio server and trunking gateway.

"I'm not aware of any problem with software of any significant magnitude," Smiles says. While it would be natural to encounter some issues in the initial end-to-end implementation of the softswitch over the operating network, "delays in reaching a broader market are not related to technical issues," Smiles says, adding that there should be no problem with scaling the packet voice network at this point.

But getting to a point where someone actually does a large field deployment is essential to the standards-setting process, notes Andy Mullan, a cable engineering consultant who serves as vice chairman for marketing at the EuroPacketCable Forum. "Drafting of the specifications is not yet complete at ETSI, which, unlike the PacketCable process in the U.S., has broken everything down into separate parts," Mullan says. "It's hard to pinpoint where the problems are until we see how the parts work together in a large rollout."

The EPC Forum was launched by eight vendors and Callahan last October as an ad hoc standards-setting group after participants in the ETSI process became alarmed over tactics they perceived as telephone companies' efforts to undermine IPCablecom. The problems began when a 12-part version of IPCablecom that had been approved early last year by the European technical community was held back from release by ETSI's board, which prompted cable interests to threaten to take the matter to the ETSI General Assembly as a case of anti-competitive obstruction. The board relented, but then the ETSI Signal Protocol Committee, which oversees the signaling issues pertaining to interfacing with the PSTN, threatened to vote against the completed portions of the standard, which led directly to the decision of Callahan and vendors to pursue a standard apart from ETSI.

Eventually, however, Forum members were persuaded that ETSI would cooperate and so are now acting within the purview of ETSI, serving to work out technical issues among Forum members in order to provide a united front on recommendations to that body. "We're getting less resistance within ETSI from (telephony) incumbents, but they still far outnumber cable's membership in the decision-making process," Mullan says.

As a result, the number of parts to the standard keeps growing as people come up with new variations on ways to do things or seek to add components that are not sought by the cable community, he adds. For example, H.248, as a media gateway alternative to MGCP, and DVB return path interfaces, neither a part of PacketCableÔ, have been added to the ETSI specifications. Moreover, any changes that occur in PacketCable specifications in the U.S., such as those with regard to the gateway coordination subcomponent of Dynamic QoS, have a ripple effect at ETSI. Noting that certification of vendors as compliant with PacketCable has yet to happen, Mullan says the view at ETSI is that even the components of IP Cablecom that are directly derived from PacketCable are "basically unstable."

In the eyes of cable vendors and operators alike the encumbrances at ETSI should not be allowed to get in the way of development of a certifiable standard that works for cable, given the fact that so much progress has been made toward practical working solutions in multi-vendor testing and, in the case of the ISH operation, actual field deployment. "We don't have a plug-and-play solution at this point, but we have reached the stage where people can proceed with commercial rollouts," notes Ben Legault, director of the IP cable technology consulting group at ADC Telecommunications, which is supplying the CMTS (cable modem termination system) and other components in the ISH rollout.

"A lot of progress has been made by a lot of vendors on almost every element of PacketCable," Legault says. "Put us together with vendors A, B and C and let us shake and bake for six months, and we'll be ready to roll."

In the view of Legault and other vendor representatives, the best way to expedite a move to commercial rollout of IPCablecom in Europe is to rely on CableLabs' certification of compliance with PacketCable as the official certification for vendors serving the European market and then let those vendors work with each other in making sure they're interoperable with regard to the handful of European-specific components that are required by European operators. "Very little additional specs are needed," Legault says. "The bulk of them are for the (trunking) gateway and MTA (modem termination adapter)."

For example, the area of greatest difference between the U.S. and Europe has to do with interfacing with the country-specific signaling systems of the PSTNs. The simplest way to proceed would be to reference the existing ETSI spec for interfacing with local signaling systems, known as TS 101-970, rather than writing what amounts to TS 101-970 into the IP Cablecom specs, Legault says. This would avoid imposing a standard differentiation between the U.S. and Europe that would render a PacketCable certification useless for Europe. "As vendors we have to make sure our systems interoperate in any event, whether they're certified or not, before we go to deployments," Legault says.

Cable operators, however, are not ready to jump to the fast track Legault suggests. Instead, under the auspices of the European Cable Communication Association, several MSOs have formed the EuroPacketCable Working Group, through which they're pursuing development of a European IPCablecom certification process in conjunction with a laboratory that had yet to be identified at press time, although sources said the selection process was virtually complete. This approach mirrors the ad hoc certification process that was set up for the EuroDOCSIS™ standard.

"This has been the idea since we launched this working group in November of 2000," says Dirk Jaeger, technical director at ECCA. "A certification board established by the operators will be sent reports on test results from the lab and will be authorized to approve or disapprove the results as being compliant with the IPCablecom specifications."

As much as possible, the certification board will use the ETSI specs for IPCablecom that are considered stable. "If the spec isn't stable or isn't usable, we'll use other documents," Jaeger says, adding that it remains to be seen just what the final list of specs will be for the certification process. But while European operators regard participation of the major carriers in the IPCablecom standards-setting process at ETSI as essential to overall acceptance of cable's IP voice services, it's virtually certain that the specs chosen from the ETSI IPCablecom potpourri will closely mirror those of PacketCable, Jaeger says.

The issue of how to deal with country-specific interfaces "is, indeed, a topic," Jaeger adds. "We can't certify all the different features of each country's telephone system," he notes. "But how the certification process will look is still in development."

The ECCA working group anticipates that these decisions will be made by year's end, with a pre-certification dry run of interoperability testing getting underway early in the first quarter. After that the certification waves will begin, with everyone hoping that it won't take very many waves to achieve certification of at least some vendors.

While vendors might look on the ECCA certification process as duplicative of what they have to go through at CableLabs in the U.S., it's clear that European operators want to be sure they have direct control over the interpretation of IPCablecom as it applies to their needs. Ultimately, it appears that the European operators' willingness to be selective as to which ETSI specs they use and which they avoid will lead them to choices that are very close to what the vendors would choose if they were in the driver's seat, which is to say, essentially the PacketCable specs as already accepted by the ITU and adopted within ETSI.

"My bet is the longer ETSI takes to adopt specifications, the more likely it will be that the specifications used in Europe will be like the American specs, with minor additions," Legault says. But, like it or not, he and everyone else trying to sell IPCablecom product in Europe will have to go through the operators' certification process.

Snapshot of the European IPCablecom Standardization Process

ETSI has made considerable progress toward establishing a base set of technical specifications (TS) from which an eventual ETSI standard for IPCablecom in Europe will be drawn. So far, 24 of 50 TS work items have been finalized. Much of the work is based on a list of technical requirements submitted to ETSI last year by ECCA, but there are elements that also reflect input on requirements from telecommunications entities who are not part of ECCA or the cable establishment. As a result, ETSI is expected to eventually endorse a European IPCablecom standard that embraces widely differing approaches to supporting delivery of voice and other packet communications over hybrid fiber coaxial networks. Meanwhile, ITU-T Study Group 9, which is chaired by CableLabs president and CEO Dr. Richard R. Green, this year issued its first set of recommendations for specifying the IPCablecom architecture and integrated protocol interfaces that would serve as the basis for a global communications system for HFC networks. These recommendations meet specifications defined by cable operators and vendors in North America, Europe and Asia and closely follow the architecture developed for PacketCable in the U.S., although not every PacketCable specification is included. Most of these recommendations are incorporated in the TS work items that are now finalized at ETSI.

The approved ITU recommendations are: