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There is a huge amount of content that exists and if you are aggregating content
how do you manage it in a sensible fashion so that you can rapidly assess what
to do with it and how to deliver it. There is a complete management challenge of
just how you manage and handle content purely within the content provider envir
onment but within the broader-based TM Forum, our main focus is how do you manag
e content quality end to end.
Q: Who does your Prosspero initiative help in all this?
A: Prosspero is our mechanism for taking solid standards. Prosspero doesn't try
to create the standards it helps existing ones. Take JSR 190, recently approved
through the JCP process. What we will do is take that standard and put it though
the Prosspero process to ensure that not only is there a good valid working spe
cification but whether there are reference specification, testimonials from serv
ice providers and companies who have already implemented it, are there implement
ation guides, are there training and education, is there an ecosystems of develo
pers are tools that support that implementation? That is the Prosspero process;
to take good solid technical standards an make it easily implementable.
Q: How is it going?
A: Prospero is doing exactly what we wanted it to do. What we have done is put a
number of mature standards through the Prosspero process and at www.prosspero.o
rg we have a portal where people can not only download specifications but all of
the reference implementations that are associated with that approved specificat
ion. What we have also done is build a big pipeline of stuff that is going throu
gh the Prosspero approval process. We have about twenty or so different interfac
es now going through the Prosspero process that are all mapped to the Telcommuni
cations Application Map (TAM) which defines all of the systems within a service
provider environment and we have mapped many of the critical interfaces against
that TAM and we are putting those through the Prosspero process. There are a lot
of interfaces out there and really what Prosspero is all about is getting the i
ndustry to focus on one and use it for particular purpose.
Q: What about development of the TAM?
A: Its growing very rapidly too. We wrote version one about 18 months ago and pe
ople were biting our hand off for it although it was very much was a high level
view. We released the more detailed version two about six months ago. The TAM is
stable and is being fleshed out in the areas that are hot at the moment such as
resources and services and there is going to be another version released in the
next six months that will flesh out some of the remaining areas. One of our key
efforts with the TAM is linking it in to the TM Forum's efforts on Service Deli
very Frameworks. There is a huge amount of hype around IMS STP and what the TMF
has done over the last nine months is to try and make sense of this hype to form
a single architecture agreed between all the major players in the industry all
the other industry bodies such as ETSI and the ITU. We have a High Level Archite
cture agreed which is known as the Service Delivery Framework (SDF). What we are
doing and focussed on expanding out the TM Forum key artefacts like the TAM ETO
M and SID to embrace the wider STF.
Q: What role will Super Catalysts play in the future?
A: We want to do something spectacular on the catalyst front. Not so much specta
cular in terms of all the marketing hype, but to address the whole end to end ch
allenge that the industry is facing. The first will be at Dallas, then Nice and
then Orlando next year and growing all the time. It will help attendees to under
stand and appreciate why end to end management of content service is a huge prob
lem that has to be addressed by the industry.
What this catalyst is trying to do is first shine a spot light on the big end to
end content service management challenge and second secondly identify usable wo
rk that we can adopt and use and those areas that we need to invest a lot of tim
e and money in. For example, take IPTV, one of the big problems we mentioned ear
ly on is that there is no way of knowing what quality you end up getting on you
IPTV delivered service. I can measure the transmission characteristics of the IP
pipe running to your computer and look at the jitter and delay but looking at t
he jitter and delay doesn't necessarily tell you what the quality is going to be
like for video. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) has been used for voice for the pa
st 50 years to come up with some form of subjective assessment for the voice qua
lity. There are however no companies out there who are developing automatic algo
rithms, to calculate the MOS for video coming in. That is important because if t
here is some way to manage and monitor whether the video being delivered to an i
ndividual customer is sufficiently good then if you ring in and complain about t
he quality we can objectively assess whether than is true. The consumer might no
t be happy with it but we can at least prove you are getting it. When a major Eu
ropean mobile operator began offering steaming video services it became known th
at if you rang up and told them that you were getting poor quality, they had to
refund you but they had no way of knowing if quality was good or bad and it came
close to withdrawing those services.
The same thing could happen with IPTV. That is just one example of why the manag
eability has to stretch a lot further than it has even stretched before. Now the
y don't just have to worry about getting the signal all the way to the device bu
t also whether the device works and if the end user quality is of sufficiently g
ood. Not only will the end users complain. The content provider will only allow
you to deliver movies is you can guarantee that your delivered quality will reac
h certain criteria.
For more information visit:
TMF website at www.tmforum.org or email us on mcreaner@tmforum.org
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