Service-oriented provisioning

Service oriented provisining (abbreviated SOP) is a technology concept developed during the early 2000's to curb the hyper competition developing in the WISP and ISP space.

Definition

The capability of defining and working with "services" instead of "on/off" internet access or "service profiles" - see the RADIUS protocol.

WISP / ISP perspective

By enabling service oriented provisioning a Telecom service provider can define his service offering as a specific set of services. The main advantage being that product differentiation can be achieved and thus price differentiation.

Consumer advantage

Consumers can choose services adapted to their need, this becomes specifically interesting in modern type broadband networks where traditional "laptop" access is mixed with smaller hand held devices targeting for example voice services.

Challenges

Implementing service oriented provisioning requires the network operator to re-engineer the way services are created and distributed into a network. This re-engineering is a result of extensive usage of profile oriented provisioning which technically is similar to service oriented provisioning except that a profiles based approach does not scale properly. In a profile oriented system the number of required profiles grows exponentially with the number of services provided by a network. In a service oriented system the number of required "profiles" grows linearly.