> Broadband Gear Report's VoIP Alert for May 12, 2006

Up Front

Cable's VoIP Numbers Thunder On

Cable's VoIP subscriber gains are booming along, and in some cases, ops are reporting record gains.

Cable telephony pioneer Time Warner Cable continues to lead the VoIP pack. Q1 '06 was its best ever for IP telephony subscriber adds as it boasted 270,000 new VoIP customers for the quarter. That brings the MSO to a whopping 1.4 million VoIP subs as of the end of March.

As for Comcast, the MSO said in its Q1 2006 report that its digital telephony customers were up by 211,000 for the quarter. Cablevision chimed in with 133,967 new VoIP subs for Q1 (up18.3% from December 2005). Insight, which uses VoIP technology for around 65% of its phone subs, boasted a net gain of 9,800 phone customers for the quarter, an increase of 5,500 customers over Q1 2005 net adds. Watch for Insight to deploy VoIP to all its systems by the end of this year.

On the Show Circuit

OSS/Net Management Vendors Tackle VoIP Complexities

MSOs are basking in VoIP success, but they're not satisfied to rest on their recent subscriber addition laurels. Instead, ops are asking their engineers to roll out multifarious VoIP services to keep the festivities rolling. Those include caller ID on TV and multiple line VoIP services for commercial customers. Some ops have even introduced phone portals on their Web sites wherein subs can order and manage VoIP features.

As MSOs up the ante by adding intricacies to the VoIP pot, OSS and network management vendors have used recent trade shows to hawk wares that will help engineers control the complexities that result from adding new VoIP features.

Multiple Services, Multiple Requests

"The challenge for operators is in figuring out the best way to evolve their operations and infrastructure to give customers the new services they want with top notch customer support," David Jacobs, CTO and co-founder of JacobsRimell, says. "In this new IP-based dynamic and competitive market, customers can no longer be identified by an address or a telephone number. There are multiple individuals, using multiple services, making multiple requests several times a day and this requires heavy duty information engineering to facilitate and scale the operation to satisfy customer demand."

At the Billing and OSS World conference in Miami this month, JR announced it extended its subscriber identity-based service fulfillment and management platform to facilitate converged services in the home. And, at the NCTA National Show last month, JR highlighted its customer-centric IP service fulfillment solutions including: IMS based service delivery infrastructure; customer self care; and JR's n-Play multi-service fulfillment and management platform.

Trusted Cable VoIP

On the session border control front, Acme Packet used NCTA's show to announce additional features to its solution. (Acme Packet is currently in commercial production at four of the top seven U.S. MSOs and at some of the top cable ops in Europe.) Acme Packet now supports an ENUM server interface and has proven interoperability in field deployments with Nominum's Navitas. The company also reported that it is expanding its hosted NAT traversal mechanisms with support for the emerging IETF standard STUN (Simple Traversal of UDP through NATs), STUN-Relay/TURN (Traversal Using Relay NAT) and ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment).

Self-Care and Self-Provisioning

Sigma Systems will show off its service management solutions at VON Europe in Stockholm this month. The company will highlight automated order management and service provisioning for bundled VoIP, HSD/ISP and video services Solutions include self-care and self-provisioning management for all services via the Sigma Client Services Centre and service diagnostics support for the call center via its Sigma Advanced Diagnostics Manager.

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