The digital communications revolution is creating challenges and opportunities for service providers. With increased competition from new players in the telecom space, service providers need to continuously enhance their residential, business and mobile portfolios. One strategy service providers are adopting to safeguard their competitive position is to transition away from legacy services toward all-IP offerings. This is also the time to remedy legacy infrastructure issues that have resulted in vertical organizations and service network silos. Edge convergence plays a critical role in advancing this transition.
The maturity of IP technologies and the robustness of service routing platforms have reached the point where it is now possible to adopt common hardware and software at the various network edges. Doing so provides a consistent touch point for Quality of Service (QoS) and OA&M across all residential, business and broadband wireless service domains, thereby reducing the Operations Support System (OSS) integration time and effort. As emerging applications drive greater interactivity across traditionally disparate access domains, and as the cost of maintaining dedicated edge infrastructure and service overlays mounts, the notion of a converged IP services edge as a crucial domain within the High Leverage Network (HLN) architecture proves increasingly compelling.
