Immature Device Standards Break Up 'Triple Play'

There is a tremendous amount of marketing momentum building around the term "triple play," the term du jour for deploying integrated voice, data and video services over the public networks. But if we are not careful, the industry risks overplaying its hand and mishandling the expectations of consumers and corporations. They may get a bad taste in their mouth from over-hyped technologies that do not deliver the goods.

It must be frustrating, though, for network equipment manufacturers and service providers that have embedded enough intelligence in the network to support the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements to manage multiple traffic types on the grid. That is not where the real problem lies.

The challenge that has only just begun to be addressed by organizations like the DSL Forum lies with customer premise equipment. The phones, stereos, computers, PDAs and other devices that would feed traffic on to next-generation networks are either:

A) Not smart enough to tell the network what kind of traffic they are going to pump through the network; or

B) Do not speak the same language (because of the absence of CPE QoS standards) and can therefore not communicate with the network or each other to take advantage of the QoS capabilities embedded in the network.As a default, everything will be treated by the network in the same way, which means that applications that cannot tolerate latency will experience poor performance on a "triple-play" network. Given how fickle both consumers and corporate customers can be -- that is a chance I am not sure the industry can afford to take.