Service creation on a TINA platform: an experience report

Tomorrow's telecommunications market in an open competitive environment will increase the pressure on operators to differentiate themselves from their competitors. This will mainly be done on the service level, thus increasing the importance of a flexible service architecture allowing for fast and cost effective development of new services. Furthermore we need a technology and provider independent architecture to provide new services on top of our heterogeneous legacy networks. The problem was already known in pure narrowband networks and most operators introduced the concept of a centralised service management platform in the network, the IN (Intelligent Network). But the IN architecture was designed for simple narrowband services and proved to be strongly technology and provider dependent. Therefore a new architecture has to be introduced to create new complex services in a fast and cost effective manner. The most promising service architecture at the moment is TINA. The paper presents the experience gained during the implementation and integration of different services on a TINA platform. Special attention is given to the time needed for the delivery of the services and the hurdles encountered during the implementation.