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May 2001 Issue

Special Report: Part I: Transparency and Choice
Dealing with Next-Gen Open Access
By Bruce Bahlmann, CT Contributing Editor

A la carte services offers operators new opportunities. To exploit them, operators should offer transparency, a means of providing subscribers a fixed Internet address.

The advent of open access for broadband presents customers with a choice of Internet service providers (ISPs) to best meet their needs. This selection is extremely limited, however, because being able to select a single ISP means customers may use only the services their ISP provides.

If a customer selects the least expensive ISP, that ISP may not offer more advanced services or may be slow in upgrading equipment to keep up with demand. This also makes it more difficult for third-party service providers to join ISPs in selling to customers, because to play in this space, they would need to function as ISPs rather than as specialty service providers.

ISPs traditionally have been anti-competetive in the way they provide Internet services to customers. For instance, subscribers receive a personal e-mail address for signing on to a particular ISP service--a service that is lost if a subscriber decides to change to a new, perhaps less expensive, provider. That creates an inconvenience for those who prefer to maintain a fixed e-mail address. ISPs leverage the proprietary address to keep subscribers.

A service provider specializing in voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) must provide at least minimum ISP services just to access customers. Furthermore, some of those customers may only want an IP address and wholesale Internet access--with no additional services.

"Transparency" is a new concept that resulted from multiple ISP providers having access to the same subscriber. By definition, it is a means of providing each subscriber with a fixed Internet address. Think of it as allowing the subscriber access to a post office box that remains fixed regardless of who delivers the mail.

Instead of banding together to provide transparency--or an environment that supports free and easy migration from one ISP to another--ISPs increasingly seek to bind subscribers to their services. As a result, there is not an easy way to facilitate a subscriber's transition from one ISP to another.

Open access is restrictive to competition, although it provides more choices to customers. ISPs and third-party service providers must be granted access to broadband open access by its operator. As a result, open access is not really open but rather closed to everyone but those service providers that can meet an operator's minimum requirements.

The next generation, or reincarnation, of open access must be à la carte--meaning the customer will have the freedom to mix and match ISP and third-party service provider services to form their broadband service. This freedom will allow a customer to receive, for example, an IP address and access to the Internet from one ISP, e-mail from another, Web hosting and news from another and VoIP from yet another.

The ability to mix and match service providers allows customers to select only those services they need and from service providers they know and trust. However, before operators can offer à la carte, they need the means to facilitate it. This includes providing an interface for customers and employees to select these services, track and bill the customers for them and establish transparency among service providers from the customer's perspective.

Although ISPs all vary, they provide many of the same services--Internet access along with similar applications that use the Internet, such as e-mail, news and Web hosting. These similar applications allow standards-based application clients to run on the customer premises equipment (CPE).

Even though ISPs may run different vendor applications, the fact that these applications are standards-based means the customer merely needs to configure the CPE. While some CPE vendors have made attempts to simplify changing common Internet configurations, they largely have ignored more automated means to performing these changes.

Some CPE vendors, for instance, provide a single interface for changing common Internet configurations but none of them use an automated means like dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) to manage e-mail settings. This might be a result of the many e-mail options customers have. Some receive e-mail and other services free and so may not need more than an IP address and Internet access from the ISP.

When customers elect to use different providers for Internet services other than those offered by their broadband operator, this complicates CPE configuration. Even so, it's the responsibility of the broadband operator to provide its customers with the services they request and in such a way as to limit (and if possible eliminate) CPE configuration with every change in service. Right now, customers still need to configure their CPE manually after changing ISPs.

The problem with changing configuration manually is that it complicates open access evolving from a choice of ISPs for all services to an à la carte-type of offering. An à la carte offering would permit a mixture of ISP services, and third-party service providers, to be bundled together to produce a complete Internet service for the customer. However, the bundling of these services may be confusing and challenging to the customer, since any change would require additional manual CPE configuration.

Changing ISPs also may impact certain externally important contact information about the customer. For example, if the customer changes the ISP that provides his or her e-mail, the customer's information would be lost. Similarly, a customer's personal Web or VoIP service identification also may be affected by an ISP change.

By providing transparency, the broadband operator looks out for the best interest of its customers. Transparency supplies the customer with an address for e-mail, Web hosting and VoIP that does not change regardless of which ISP or third-party service provider actually provides the service. It also provides the broadband operator with an opportunity to brand the service with its company name as opposed to the customer's current ISP or third-party service provider selection. As a result, all customers will have personal Web pages and e-mail addresses with their ISP's company name that remain constant regardless of which ISP is used.

If customers must negotiate these obstacles with each change, they will be reluctant to switch service providers--if nothing else, because of inconvenience. However, if customers received attractive perks to switch service providers (or mix and match) and had the means to make the switch extremely easy, convenient and transparent, many customers would be motivated to find the combination of service providers that is right for them.

The impact on service providers would be revolutionary--changing to à la carte would open the doors of broadband to a wide array of innovative new companies that would specialize and offer customers services never before imagined. While traditional ISPs attempt to build upon their existing services, new blood in the service provider space would force these ISPs to become either access-focused or service provider-focused so as to compete with other service providers or as access providers. Customers benefit from this competition by receiving improved access and more choices among services they are able to receive over their broadband connection.

Redirecting services

For a broadband operator or third party to offer transparency to its customers, a certain amount of equipment and software is required. The purpose of this equipment and software is to receive Internet and local traffic, redirect it to a customer's chosen ISP or service provider or just route standard Internet application requests to the customer's chosen supplier of that service. This equipment and software must be relatively maintenance-free and easy to install.

The simplest example of redirection would be news services. Let's say a customer selected ISP-C for news services. The broadband operator provides him or her with a configuration for the news server (such as the host name news.mn.operator.net). When the customer launches his or her news application, the ISP attempts to connect to a news server at news.mn.operator.net. However the host at this location is not a news server but rather a redirector. The redirector receives this request and forwards it to news.mn.isp-c.com--according to the customer's current selection of a news service provider.

If and when the customer decides to change to another news service provider, he or she either calls the operator or goes to the operator's self-service Web site to change update information on who supplies the news service. If the customer selects a different ISP for news, the currently configured news server will switch to the new ISP's news server and use that provider until the service is changed again.

If the customer doesn't select a different news server, the news application will not be redirected or will be redirected to an internal news server provided by the operator.

In the above scenario, the request to connect to the news server may be used to identify the individual making the request. Identification is required because each customer's selection of services may be different and so the redirector must look up the selections to redirect as necessary.

Identification may be simply locating a customer's IP address if the customer resides on a broadband network. If the IP address were looked up in the DHCP server, it would return either the customer's ID or the customer's media access control (MAC) address. Either of these could be used to obtain the customer's service selections in his or her profile.

While other ways may exist to access the customer's service selection more quickly, when the customer resides on the broadband network, it is good to know that some piece of information in the request is used to identify the customer and access or obtain current service selections. Once obtained, these service selections are used to populate a service profile for the customer in the redirector. (See Table 1 for an example of a potential service profile.)

The entries will be associated with their applicable transmission control protocol (TCP) port so that any traffic received on that port would be redirected to the IP address associated with it. Because the source IP address of the packet remains unchanged, the news server response may proceed to the source directly without requiring the redirector--that is, the redirector needs only to process requests and information sent to the servers and does not need to handle any incoming traffic from them. Any application, such as normal browsing or telnet, is not part of a typical ISP or other offering, so these applications do not require redirecting. Basically, redirecting may apply only to core services, such as the ones the customer would need to pay for or would select during their sign-up process. Other services that meet these criteria would be candidates for redirection.

Note that providing transparency is dependent on a single customer per CPE model. It would be difficult to support if multiple broadband customers wanted to use the same CPE but with different service profiles--at least initially. Ideally, an operator could support individual service selections (service profiles associated with a particular user), but this requires the service profile to index off something other than the customer CPE IP address, and would require a more sophisticated redirection process to validate the customer and create a unique service profile entry.

Again, the best way to provide quick redirection-processing is to use the CPE IP address as the index service profile. This model allows multiple users to use the same CPE using the same service selection profile.

Bruce Bahlmann is a contributing editor to CT. He may be reached at .

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