November 29th, 2005
CableLabs RFP reveals tech wish list for cable VoIP providers
CableLabs is a consortium of cable television access providers charged by member companies with developing enhanced services….
They’ve just put out an RFP ("Request For Proposal) for solutions that could, in CableLabs own words, "enable the development of a production-grade infrastructure to allow VoIP traffic exchange among MSOs and between other service providers. This capability is called VoIP Peering. And the Peering Architecture they envision is up top.
I’ve just read the RFP. Going through the list of six basic VoIP peering functions will be a helpful way not only to understand what CableLabs want, but what the big cable systems that want to offer VoIP are expecting from VoIP peering.
The six VoIP Peering functions CableLabs is talking about include:
Service Discovery and Location- Provide means for operators to discover whether a user is a cable subscriber, and provide means for operators to locate the service address;
Addressing- Provide means for operators to query the service capabilities and address the network resource to invoke the service;
Signaling- Interoperable signaling mechanisms and protocols between operators to initiate service sessions with feature transparency;
Transport- Data peering, QoS (Quality of Service) and Security;
Service Discovery and Location- Provide means for operators to discover wether a user is a cable subscriber (by determining) if this telephone number is a VoIP number belonging to another MSO’s (Multi System cable Operator) domain? This would be done via ENUM query/DNS discovery. Also, provide means for operators to locate the service address, such as via a service specific URL such as sip://john.doe@mso.net;
Addressing- Provide means for operators to query the service capabilities and address the network resources to invoke the service. For VoIP, the RFP details this would be done this way: once the subscriber service URL is located, what is the MSO SIP proxy server to contact to establish the communications or signaling to initiate a session? The SIP routing model defines means to determine the SIP proxy: for (example performing a DNS server query on the URL domain name.
Initial replies to the RFP are due by December 14.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
