The Service Switching Point: Gateway to the Intelligent Network
John Visser · 2005
The IN SSP will play a key role in the telecommunications business in the mid to late 1990s. The business rationale for this is considered in two parts: the overall market forces driving requests for IN and therefore IN SSPs, and the translation of these market forces into business opportunities. The key market forces are the ever increasing demands for services, rising demand for service custornization, and increasing depth of competition in the rapidly evolving telecommunications marketplace. In the evolution of the public network services architecture, there is a clear trend toward increased intelligence outside the switch. AIN is the technology drive that will support this trend for the next decade. AIN provides the means to expand beyond traditional switch-based services into the provision of services that fall naturally into a centralized structure and into a range of services of individually limited penetration for which a switch-based implementation is usually unjustifiable. The translation of these market forces into business opportunities requires complete service solutions and complete infrastructure solutions. These will enable mutual leverage of service and network experience to provide the best value to the end customer. This will be achieved through vendors providing open platform and technology solutions ensuring global market and business effectiveness, driving evolution from services perspective, and partnering with key, strategic customers to achieve the mutual benefits of IN. Services drive implementation: customer requirements define implementation order. Ongoing customer interactions are vital to ensuring correct service-based prioritization of SSP rollout. The interactions solidify customer value and consequently ensure that IN SSP value is realized. The IN SSP is the place at which distributed service logic interacts with the call. This makes the IN SSP the linchpin that keeps the service and the call together. A key point in the evolution of the intelligent network is that the IN SSP software will become the network's "operating system" for services. As such, IN SSP software will experience regular upgrading and enhancement. This ongoing process is already seen in North America by the progression of Bellcore AIN Release 0.0, 0. I and 0.2, with discussions already underway on subsequent releases. It is equally seen internationally by the progression of' standards for ITU-T CS- 1 and CS-2, and ETSI INAP.