Looking to smooth out DSL delivery

by Michael Martin

February 12, 2001 —

Virtual Access is aiming to solve the thorny issue of identifying and resolving problems in DSL networks without involving the DSL wholesaler.

The Ascot, England, firm's recently announced DSL Service Managed Gateway is designed to let DSL resellers manage their customers through a browser-based interface. The Service Managed Gateway is being sold to wholesalers that would make the platform's management capabilities available to their resellers.

"There are some real issues between the DSL wholesaler and the DSL reseller," says Philip Smith, director of sales development at Virtual Access. "The customer is owned by the reseller. But if a customer comes to a reseller with a problem, the reseller has to determine if the problem is on the reseller's end or on the wholesaler's end. This often isn't easy to determine."

Some DSL equipment vendors have tried to resolve the problem by installing diagnostic tools within DSL access multiplexers (DSLAM). Smith says this doesn't help much because the DSLAM is owned by the wholesaler and can't typically be accessed by the reseller.

So Virtual Access has taken a different approach and embedded management functionality within the customer premises equipment (CPE).

The approach depends on three elements: the CPE, known as the Service Managed Gateway; Service Managed Servers, which reside at the central office and handle traffic aggregation and quality of service; and Activator, a service controller, which handles flowthrough provisioning and gives the reseller a management interface. By using these elements, a wholesaler can give resellers proactive alerting and diagnostic tools in the form of Java applets. The tools include spectrum analysis components that would normally be available only through a protocol analyzer, he says.

If a problem in the DSL network means a customer can't get a connection, the reseller can still link to the customer through a redundant dial-up connection in the Service Managed Gateway.

The Service Managed Gateway costs about $600. Wholesalers also pay a license fee for Activator based on the number of customers. For a base of 80,000 to 100,000 customers, the fee would be about 25 cents per customer, per month.

The Service Managed Gateway will work with any DSLAM and is available in asymmetric DSL, ISDN-based DSL, symmetric DSL and very-high bit rate DSL flavors.

Matthew Davis, an analyst with The Yankee Group, says several companies have been working on products to improve the reseller/wholesaler relationship.

"There's been a challenge in being able to track down problems between the DSL reseller and the [competitive local exchange carrier] wholesaler and between the wholesaler and the [incumbent local exchange carrier]," he says.

Davis says no vendor seems to have an all-in-one solution.

"It comes down to whether you want a dumb device at the edge and manage it all centrally, or whether you have more intelligence at the edge and pay a bit more," he says.

Network World