MEF18 Proof of Concept, 29 – 31 Oct – MEF 3.0 LSO Federated Inter-Carrier Bandwidth-on-Demand Services Through Automated Discovery and Blockchain Settlement.
PoC Participants: PCCW Global, Sparkle, Tata Communications, SingTel, CBCcom, Liquid Telecom, Infonas, Clear, and Cataworx.
This group won the MEF18 PoC Silver Award.
Speaker: Shahar Steiff, AVP, New Technology, PCCW Global.
A typical Communications Service Provider (CSP) owns and delivers a combination of network connectivity, compute, and storage services that are bundled into billable product offerings. It is most likely that such product offerings rely on partner CSPs that use each other’s resources to complement geographical or service capability coverage. To meet its potential, the market needs solutions that will dramatically streamline the commercial interactions between the CSP partners in the supply chain delivering such products. Those interactions typically include establishment of legal and commercial relationships, inquiries about availability of services, requests for quotes, placement of orders, billing, and settlement. As new and ever more complex products enter the market, commercial interactions based on manual intervention and processing using, for example, phone-calls, emails, and fax, will continue to consume significant time, thus delaying the delivery of these high margin services and holding back market growth.
Secure automation of these commercial interactions is highly significant for the availability of services supporting the growth of productivity and the global economy. In the immediate term, demonstrations of automation of billable connectivity/compute/storage services are of great significance to CSPs and vendors of commercial and business platforms.
This PoC provides a powerful demonstration of the dramatic reduction in time and resources required by service providers and partner operators throughout the commercial and business phases of the lifecycle of each service, as well as the ability to offer new products and services with deployment times significantly shorter than the current typical weeks or months. The PoC is based on the distributed ledger paradigm where commercially-sensitive transactions and information are managed using blockchain technology. Although blockchain is popularly perceived as being synonymous with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchain can be used for a large variety of applications of distributed ledgers, including global supply chain verticals. The PoC illustrates the automation of commercial interactions, including product offer discovery, recursive quoting, and blockchain-based settlement and clearing across a network of seven wholesale/transit operator domains.
In addition, automated commercial interactions require machine-to-machine interfaces standardized and designed in such a way that they can be used by most, if not all, the suppliers and customers of these connectivity, compute, and storage billable services. MEF is making progress in standardizing business interaction interfaces (LSO Sonata APIs) which form an important part of this demonstration. These APIs have been combined in this demonstration with smart contract technology in which pre-standardized commercial and business service attributes are captured and expressed dynamically in machine form. This combination of MEF-defined APIs, smart contract technology, and the secure distributed ledger paradigm based on blockchain technology will enable the dramatic reduction of time and human resources in querying, quoting, ordering, billing, and settlement between stakeholders in the WAN-based services market, as well as the explosive growth of new services based on end-to-end, multi-domain, automation.
Save the date for MEF19, 18-22 November 2019, JW Marriott, LA LIVE, Los Angeles.
