ISP 2004 - Everything Comes Together

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ISP 2004 - Everything Comes Together

January 20th, 2004 Issue

The economy must really be on the upswing, if Downtown Disney is any indication. NTCA’s ISP 2004 Summit was held across the street from Downtown Disney and both the conference and the theme park were filled with lots of people. The ISP 2004 Summit was no fantasy-land, however, as over 35 speakers gave the current state of the Internet Service Provider industry, but from the perspective of the Independent Operating Telephone company.

This three day summit covered all things ISP. This conference did a good job of showing how telephony and video services are beginning to converge with the ISP offering. With regards to service convergence, one Midwest telco ISP explained how they are experimenting with providing video over their wireless 802.xx network. A couple of speakers mentioned the application, whereby the ISP/Telco might only provide video on demand services to their base and not a traditional cable television offering.

Club Viodi members, click here to read the white paper I wrote on this concept last summer.

One of the more astute observations was made by Jane Jude, Product Development Manager of Hargray Communications, when she suggested that there are no more “killer applications”, but only niche services. She made the important point that these services, when taken together, can begin to positively impact the bottom line. Further, these services make the overall ISP service stickier and less likely to churn.

Some of the niche services she suggested included off-line storage, electronic safety deposit boxes and unified messaging. The unified messaging application has worked for me, but it is something I had to cobble together and wasn't offered by my ISP. Another service she mentioned was home security monitoring. With home networking and the always-on feature of DSL, this is a feature that becomes much easier to implement than in years past. What better way to support home networking, than to sell the boxes at retail. Hargray is finding success selling the boxes and associated hardware service plans.

Rick Kerr of Panhandle Telephone explained how they implemented video services using Myrio middleware and Calix hardware. He explained some of the technical and operational challenges of moving into video services, particularly the difficulties with dealing with broadcasters and issues of non-duplication of their signals.

One thing that impressed me on the show floor was NeoNova’s demonstration of a system that allows a customer service representative to provision telephony, Internet and video services from a common interface. This should simplify, from an operations standpoint, the introduction of video services into a telco's network. Their interface is operational with the Motorola (NLC), Myrio and, soon, Minvera’s video provisioning/back-office systems. This kind of third-party integration is an indicator that video over xDSL is starting to become a mature technology.

The conference left me with the overall impression that the Independent Telco ISP industry is robust and growing. Scale is one of the bigger challenges facing the Independent ISPs, as there are just so many hats and activities a small operator has to perform. Over and over, it was stated or implied that, just like the telephony operations, the real big differentiating factor for the independent telcos is that they are local. This really just skims the surface of the conference. Some more of the tips and techniques will be provided in the next issue.

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