The NGN Opportunity

Key Factors of NGN

One major benefit of NGNs is that the same network can be used to carry voice, data and Internet traffic. This means that a service provider's costs are reduced, leading to more competitive prices for all 3 services. This cost reduction is why BT are investing so much money into their 21CN project - the project to replace their legacy single purpose networks with a single converged IP/MPLS network. This cost reduction is also why you have seen voice rates from companies like Gamma and Opal become ever more competitive.

The big thing that NGNs have enabled is lower cost, more flexible private networks. Known as MPLS VPNs or IP VPNs, demand for these services has never been greater. Some resellers are setting up an MPLS VPN and then using this for delivering quality assured VOIP services to all their customers. Other resellers are reselling MPLS networks to their customers and then perhaps taking some hosting space and delivering applications to these customers in a secure and quality assured way.

NGN Opportunity

I've already stated that I think the largest opportunity from NGNs is to sell MPLS VPN services.

However, some of your customers might not be ready for MPLS just yet. So, for those that aren't, look to sell in Ethernet based Internet access or point-to-point leased lines, the costs have reduced dramatically thanks to the NGN rollouts. Also, the humble broadband line has come a long way thanks to the NGN networks. It is now possible to buy broadband services with assured bandwidth rates, Quality of Service and higher upstream rates.

If you partner with an aggregator like Griffin that has all the products in the portfolio and a true NGN, then it is very simple to migrate a customer with an estate of standalone leased lines or broadband lines to MPLS at a later date, because all the services are being delivered off the same underlying network, so there is no cease and re-provide.

Essential Components

The essential components that resellers need to be looking for are:

1. Broadband with QoS / assured bandwidth
2. Broadband with higher upstream bandwidth (Annex M)
3. Access to the BT IPStream Connect footprint to provide best coverage
4. National Ethernet services
5. MPLS IP VPN services
6. The ability to migrate 1,2,3,4 or 5 seamlessly between being used for Internet access and being used for MPLS

One of the most important things that a reseller should consider when deciding on a supplier is sales support, provisioning and technical support. In most cases the reseller won't have experience of QoS, MPLS and National Ethernet. They will need help building their proposition, they will need help selling and they will want to ensure that they are able to deliver excellent customer support for their customers. No reseller wants to end up being 'piggy in the middle' when the customer's service is down, the carrier is being slow, and they can't do anything without the carrier.

Griffin provides resellers with pre-sales technical support, including attending customer meetings. Griffin provides a web based provisioning platform that is widely recognised as being industry leading. This platform enables resellers to do their own provisioning, diagnostics, fault reporting and engineer booking. All this, via not just one NGN DSL supplier but the three largest in the UK. The same platform can be used for Internet services and MPLS services.

Future Proposition

I think NGN services are the glue that holds a reseller's proposition together. The connectivity isn't the whole story though. The most successful resellers will combine NGN connectivity with hosted IT applications. This year is seeing hosted telephony and SIP trunking growth like never before - so VOIP should be part of the proposition also.