Open Access Choices for the US Market

Retail providers are aggregating networks – acquisition, partnership, use of open access, all of the above. The drivers for this will not be deterred by operational challenges – as anyone on the operations or IT side of the house knows, those will simply have to be overcome and resolved.

So if the issue is how to align operational models across networks that were never designed to work together, how should we think about it?

Regardless of whether you are a retailer aggregating and acquiring networks or an Open Access provider aggregating retailers, the decision tree roughly looks the same.

First decision point is do something or do nothing. Do nothing is certainly a valid choice. It is possible to sell on a newly acquired network without tight integration and it is possible to support customers. But it becomes complex and requires and increasingly large amount of manual work to compensate. And from the retailer’s perspective speed to subscriber growth is king and everyone knows that complex processes are never invisible to the customer. It will bubble to the surface somewhere (more likely everywhere). From the Open Access providers perspective the choice to do nothing slows down the addition of retailers – a fundamental flaw in the business model.

So if we choose to do something what would the requirements look like?

We would certainly want to re-use as much of the existing infrastructure as possible. The “digital retail layer” of the retailer will of course stay – anything that touches the customer falls in the category of “their brand” and their unique operational model. But we also don’t want to make time consuming changes to the underlying network.

We would certainly want to have scalability – whatever we do should be easily extensible to the next acquired network (in the case of the retailer) or to the next additional retailer (in the case of the open access provider).

And we would certainly want to allow evolution of all of the various components in an operational infrastructure independently - at the time and place of the owners choosing – these are after all complex systems.

So what options exist?

Bespoke integration is a traditional approach. The work is certainly do-able. But it may not be re-usable. So if the growth plan includes future partner networks then each additional network is a new integration project. And as a second order effect it is customizing around existing systems which means that future evolution of specific systems also becomes custom. Each custom integration becomes part of the architecture and over time these accumulate making future change progressively more difficult. And of course, it takes time and expense and the thesis of acquisition and the thesis of Open Access was that it would be faster and more cost effective than new build.

Is there another option? If doing nothing fails on complexity and bespoke integration fails on rigidity then we are looking for flexibility, simplicity and repeatability.

Requirements don’t tell us what to build – just what the successful architecture must enable.

That then leads to a few architectural principles and at VX Fiber our solution is built on them.

• Data Abstraction - the underlying networks relevant data has to be uniform and normalized and presented in a format consumable by the workflows. Regardless of network you now have repeatability and flexibility.
• Workflow Independence – the workflows cannot be specifically “hard coded” to a particular network. They must be common, and aligned with the operators desired workflows already in use in other markets and now applied to the new network for delivery of the common brand regardless of network.
• Operational State – to resolve workflow differences across networks a single source of “truth” is required and must be kept. What is the state of an asynchronous workflow? This has to be presentable removing complexity.

Together these three principles separate the retail operating model from the unique implementation of each underlying network, making operational repeatability – the common playbook – possible.

Open Access 2.0 is not about choosing between retailer requirements and network economics. It’s about creating an operational model where both can scale together and it can be done.

We elaborate on these architectural requirements and why they matter in our Executive Brief: Introducing Open Access 2.0. Find it here…

We elaborate on how VX Fiber implements these in our VX Fiber Solution Brief: How we deliver on the Operational Requirements of Multi Network Environments. Find it here…