Controlling Telecom in a Centralized Way

Telecom management is one area where centralized control tends to generate better results. Of course it isn’t an absolute truth; multinational companies must balance the benefits of centralized management against the difficulties of managing infrastructures in different countries with different languages, currencies, and cultures.  

It is our experience that policies and standards should be defined globally as far as possible. This creates an environment where teamwork and cross-regional support are possible, greatly enhancing the efficiency of the human capital deployed across the organization.  Here we emphasize the need to have unified inventory databases, processes, and technological standards. Sometimes, several arms of a large organization spread around the world do not understand the benefits of unified policies and standards. Usually, the telecommunications team in each country tends to believe that its own ways are the best, but anyone who has managed a multinational telecommunications area knows that having standards is better, even if they are not going to be optimal in every environment. When telecom management is centralized, it leads to the following benefits: 

• better prices (usually due to global negotiation, where the full weight of the organization is brought to the table, yielding better discounts) 

• better control (when only one group is responsible for telecom resources, it usually reduces problems such as overcharges, overlaps, and having unidentified resources or resources that are not used) 

• lower operational costs (when headcounts are reduced, there is a consequent reduction in personnel costs) 

Centralizing control usually enables the organization to identify its telecom expenses. That fact alone is usually enough to justify centralization, because it shows how much telecom represents within the IT/infrastructure budget and keeps the subject on management’s radar.  

In more general terms, we have to keep in mind that telecom is a logistic system, and as such, the whole may be more than the sum of the parts. 

It would be interesting to insert a caveat into the argument here that centralized management doesn’t necessarily mean a centralized operation. If you have the right tools, you may be able to control and contract in a centralized way and yet keep the operation distributed, enabling different telecom teams to operate in different countries, for example.  

This is feasible, as long as you manage to make all teams use the same management tools, under a defined hierarchical framework. That means that the local telecom teams may have some autonomy to contract telecom resources (the ones not covered for the worldwide contract, for example), but they have to include each contract and resource in a corporate telecom management tool in such a way that headquarters can see all the telecom expenditures and all resources contracted in all countries. The local teams will see only their own expenditures and resources.  

Therefore, we may divide the term “centralization” into two types: financial and technical. Even if operational aspects force technical decentralization, financial centralization remains crucial. The centralized telecom management has to keep track of what is contracted and how much it is costing.  Financial centralization refers to the following:

• centralized resource inventory (including data, voice, and mobile resources) 

• centralized contract inventory (including voice, data, mobile services, and maintenance) 

• centralized telecom bills (even if received in different countries, all bills would be included in a common tool in a standardized framework, allowing centralized control) 

• centralized billing system 

• centralized bill auditing process (at least in a country basis) Technical centralization refers to the following: 

• centralized help desk for telecom issues 

• centralized point of contact with the telecom providers 

• centralized point of contact for equipment maintenance 

            • centralized network operational center (NOC) 

The Relevant Standards Bodies

Two major bodies have been involved in standards relevant are the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (www.ietf.org) and the International Telecommunications Union—Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) (www.itu.int). ITU-T has also issued a set of data communications standards (the X-series) in collaboration with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (www.iso.ch). The ISO Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) suite has had much influence on the basic concepts and terminology presently used in the IETF, and many IETF protocols have the OSI genes.


Another important organization, formerly named the European Computer Manufacturers’ Association, is now known only by its acronym, ECMA (www.ecma.ch/). ECMA is an international industry association chartered for standardizing information and communication systems.


The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a specialized agency of the United Nations, has been standardizing everything related to traditional telephone networks since the time they first appeared—ITU began in the 1860s, standardizing telegraphy. Historically, almost all telephone networks were operated by government agencies, which explains the place of ITU in the United Nations. Membership in ITU is open to all governments that belong to the UN, while private sector network providers, equipment vendors, and other international organizations may hold individual memberships, as Sector Members, in one or more of the three Sectors of ITU: ITU-T (Telecommunication Standardization), ITU-R (Radiocommunication), and ITU-D (Telecommunication Development). The governments, or Member States as they are known in ITU, belong to the three ITU Sectors as a matter of right. In general, membership involves paying a membership fee.


For the period from 1997 to 2000, ITU-T has fourteen active Study Groups, each of which leads standardization in a particular area (e.g., transmission, operations and management, switching and signaling, multimedia, network management). Each Study Group further divides its work among Working Parties. Specific, focused studies are performed within the Working Parties in what are known as Questions.


Any member may submit ideas in a contribution to the relevant Study Group, and as work progresses and a draft standard is developed, it will be published in the official reports of the Study Group meetings. When the draft is determined to be sufficiently mature, it is sent to all Member States and Sector Members for final comment and then consideration for approval at a Study Group meeting. The results of this process are international standards called ITU-T Recommendations. This term reflects on the subtlety that the documents serve as Recommendations to Member States, which could (but do not have to) adopt them. With the role of the governments in standardizing telecommunications diminishing, the industry more and more views ITU-T Recommendations as standards. Although the process of preparing the Recommendations is based on the consensus of participants reached at the meetings, the Recommendations are presently approved by the Member States present at the Study Group meeting at which final text is considered for approval. When published by ITU-T, the Recommendations are available to anyone for a fee; however, the interim drafts and working documents are available free, but only to members.


The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) [unlike its umbrella organization, the Internet Society (ISOC)] has no legal status and no defined membership. Nevertheless, for a nonexistent (at least legally) organization, the IETF has done a remarkable job in producing stable and widely implemented Internet standards. The IETF is divided into eight broad expertise areas: the Applications Area, Internet Area, Operations and Management Area, Routing Area, Transport Area, Security Area, User Services Area, and General Interest Area. Areas are in turn divided into working groups, which focus on specific subjects of standardization. The decisions are typically made online (by consensus—there is no voting in the IETF), and anyone with access to the Internet can participate in any working group and get hold of any IETF documents for free. The terminology involved in naming the IETF documents requires some further elucidation.


A contribution to the IETF takes the form of an Internet Draft. Anyone can submit his or her ideas in such a document, which is published by the IETF upon request without prescreening for relevance or technical accuracy. The publication of an Internet Draft implies no IETF endorsement. The Internet Drafts are working documents, which are stored by the IETF for a period of six months and then automatically removed. Some are working group documents, but many are just individual publications whose authors want the IETF to take a look at them. 


RFCs are approved and published by the RFC editor (in many cases, the RFCs are developed by respective working groups and then approved by the IETF) and stored permanently under unique numbers.


The term RFC, however, can denote a nonstandard document (such an RFC can be either informational or experimental) as well as a standards track document. Unless otherwise specified, the RFCs referred are always the standards track ones. The maturity levels (based on the maturity of a specification, existence of interoperable implementations, and deployment) are proposed standard, draft standard, and standard. The criteria for assigning these levels (as part of the comprehensive specification of the Internet standards process) are published in RFC 2026. Finally, yet another subseries of the standards RFC is called best current practice (BCP), which, according to RFC 2026, is “designed to be a way to standardize practices and the results of community deliberations.” RFC 2026, for example, is a BCP.


Although ITU-T had implicitly used (and referred to) IETF documents in the past, until recently it could not do so explicitly. Since 1996, however, cooperation between the two organizations has made progress, and as ISOC became a member of ITU-T, the official cross-group representation has been maintained on several projects. This cooperation has already resulted in reducing duplication of effort. For obvious reasons, in the area of the integrating Internet and telecommunications, this partnership is crucial to the success of future standards.


Other important standards bodies whose work is relevant to the subject include:


The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) (www.etsi.org), which has played an important role both in developing telecommunications standards for the European Union and contributing to ITU-T. The ETSI Telecommunications and Internet Protocol Harmonization Over Networks (TIPHON) project has become an international effort dedicated to the architecture and protocol requirements in support of IP telephony.


The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE) (www.ieee.org). The IEEE has standardized local area network (LAN) protocols, among many other things.


The ATM Forum (www.atmforum.org) has had a major influence on the work on broadband ISDN in ITU-T and overall development of the concept and technology in support of quality of service.


The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) (www.tiaonline.org) and T1 (www.t1.org). TIA and T1 have been developing American National Standards for wireless communications and the PSTN, respectively. Both have addressed interworking with IP networks.

Key Telecommunications Services [Telecom]

Telecommunications services can be divided into three key categories;
- voice
- data
- and video.

Each of these categories has specific characteristics such as maximum transmission delay time, minimum and maximum transmission rates, and acceptable transmission error types and rates.

VOICE
Voice services involves receiving of audio signals, processing audio signals into various formats (analog and digital), storing and transporting these signals, and converting the signals back into a form that is similar to its original form. The characteristics of voice networks are very small transmission delay (below 100 msec typical), maximum of 64 kbps for each digital voice channel, and reasonable tolerance to errors. Examples of voice services are Telephony, Voice Messaging, Call Processing, and Computer and Telephony Integration, CTI.

DATA
Data services provide transport of digital information from one point to one or more points. The characteristics of data networks are moderate transmission delays (above 1 sec may be acceptable), minimum of 28 kbps for each dial-up digital customer and 1 Mbps for each broadband customer, and very low tolerance to errors. Examples of data services include switched connections (circuit switched channels / dial-up, dedicated lines (leased lines/circuits), packet switching (e.g. Internet), and multicast and broadcast (one to many) data transfer.

VIDEO
Video services transport high information content signals (video) from one point to one or more points. The characteristics of video networks are very long transmission delay (above 15 seconds for digital broadcast acceptable), minimum of 1 Mbps for each digital video channel (3.2 Mbps for DVD), and reasonable tolerance to errors. Examples of video services include television, closed circuit TV (CCTV), video on demand (VOD), videoconferencing, and interactive multimedia.