While triple play services, which combine voice, data and video at once, provide cost-effectiveness, they need careful management to ensure optimum performance, say industry players.
Vanessa Guerra, marketing manager at networking solutions provider Billion SA, notes: “The emergence of triple play broadband access technologies has not just created exciting new revenue opportunities for network and Internet service providers, but also offers low-cost telephone and entertainment alternatives to consumers.
“It is now possible to mass distribute high-quality voice and video to home and office broadband users over the existing copper telephone connections at a low cost, wired or wirelessly.”
She adds that the tremendous growth in the mobile and WLAN markets is likely to see continuing consumer demand for triple play services, without sacrificing the convenience and freedom of wireless.
However, Letlhaka Technologies technical director, Riaan Janse van Rensburg, says there needs to be an end-to-end alliance between vendor, importer, turn-key network solution provider, and service operators for companies to maximise on triple play and rein in network failures.
He points out that a lot of companies have attempted to implement triple play access networks but failed primarily due to using the wrong technologies. “While it is simple to deliver Internet, especially at the relatively low speeds available in SA, it is already a challenge to deliver proper clear voice calls without dropping them.
“Now if you add IPTV and video-on-demand, then most technologies fall over because they simply cannot deliver constantly a guaranteed throughput,” he explains.
“You might be able to connect one or two or even 10 users on a network, but if you get to hundreds then it gets really challenging.”
The other reason why many companies face network failures, says Janse van Rensburg, is using cheap and dysfunctional equipment. “There are companies that will throw any cheap equipment into a development and try to run ISP services over it.”
He adds that installing cheap equipment will always come back to haunt the organisation as such equipment easily breaks down.
On the implementation of networking solutions, Janse van Rensburg notes many organisations find the process inhibitive as they do not invest sufficiently in the human capital to perform the task.
“Companies attempting triple play access networks usually do not invest heavily in human capital. So they end up with network designs that are wrong and implementations that just do not work,” he says.
Related story:
Enterprise networking in 2015
Share