DALLAS--Leave it to a cable company to come in and identify a long-standing and growing concern that mobile operators have been too busy growing to address. Time Warner Cable sees market potential in wireless backhaul and chose to explore its potential further by championing the Mobile Backhaul Management Catalyst.

TWC joined the TM Forum about a year and a half ago. Jonathan Anderson, vice president of network operations for Time Warner Cable, said his company joined for reasons similar to many cable companies who have since joined the forum: “We are trying to meet the needs of our customers and TMF has shown they can offer resources that help companies in that direction,” he said.

One of the ways TMF can help is providing a forum for these Catalyst projects. Anderson said one of the noteworthy things about this project is how many companies have gotten together for this project.

The rest of the cohort for this project includes Alcatel-Lucent, BEA, Cisco Systems, Cognizant Technology Solutions, IBM, Nakina Systems, Sun and Telcordia, with Cognizant acting as the team leader.

Based on industry estimates that say backhaul costs account for as much as 35% of mobile operators’ network operating expenses (30-40% of total operating expenses,) the group sees opportunity here. They say the growth rate of minutes-of-use and of new services, such as wireless broadband and mobile video, present a scalability planning dilemma for mobile operators.

This project addresses the monitoring and management of a specific Cable Commercial Service known as Mobile Backhaul Service. The group is trying to create a blueprint for a robust, flexible and open platform for this purpose using proven standards such as MTOSI (multi-technology operations system interface) and common interfaces from the TM Forum such as OSS/J. It also will utilize the TMF’s shared information and data (SID) model and eTOM standard.

A mobile backhaul network is a classic example of the multi-vendor, multi-technology environment. These networks also often cross service provider domains from their access points back to the operator environment. TWC wanted to create a realistic environment through which it could better ways to provide this type of service were it to proceed in this direction.

“This Catalyst is an R&D project for us,” Anderson said. “We are doing it to learn more hands-on what would be involved in order to do backhaul in general.”

Anderson expects to learn more about how to maximize certain processes and technology, but more important, how to scale them and how they integrate with network and service management in general. He said last week that TWC had not committed to entering this space. “We do lots of R&D, not all of which comes to fruition,” he said.

However, TWC Chief Technology Officer Mike LaJoie made the prospect sound more certain in his keynote address to the forum on Tuesday. “It is a simple product but new to us and one which we are now embarking on,” LaJoie said. “We want to generate revenue by providing that service to mobile operators. They need an end-to-end solution.”

The demonstration will include Ethernet backhaul technology. In its first phase, it will concentrate on the fault management and inventory aspects of mobile backhaul. In addition to the standard interfaces mentioned above, it will apply a service oriented architecture framework and focus on governance. The goal through multiple phases is to develop a blueprint for standards-based OSS for managing these services.

One lesson Anderson said the group learned from this already is that while the MTOSI 1.0 standard is available and being used for some fault and trouble management, they are eagerly awaiting the next version. “Until MTOSI 2.9 comes out, we won’t be able to do some of the fault and performance management things we want to do,” he said. “That’s why we see this as a Phase I project, getting off the ground with the first release and when [MTOSI] 2.0 becomes available, we can look at some of these performance aspects.”

Anderson said it is important for a company like TWC to be mindful of which vendors incorporate standards such as MTOSI and OSS/J because they will be inherently more adaptable that those who don’t.