The advent of triple-play services will make service providers accountable for delivering quality services to their customers. Home networks' increasing complexity and the average customer's lack of knowledge in setting up, configuring, and handling those networks raises the worry that home networks may become the source of many problems, particularly during installation.

The DSL Forum has been proactive in establishing and promoting standard management solutions for digital home networks, including TR-69 CPE WAN management protocol. Standards are essential for guaranteeing future safe solutions that satisfy service providers' needs for a sound and consistent management that can easily cope with most or all CPE vendors on the market.

But managing home networks is not the end of the road. Service providers' key challenge is coping with the anticipated high growth of triple-play service subscription and delivering the QoS that matches customer expectations. While the industry is increasingly looking to facilitate customer self-management for OPEX reduction, it is essential that the problem be also addressed at a wider end-to-end scale by which services are delivered to the home with a good level of quality that remains stable over time.

Nicolas Van Den Abeele Vice President, APAC, Access Networks Division Alcatel

Mr. Van Den Abeele has a broad experience in the telecom industry and has held various management positions at Alcatel in Europe and Central and Latin America. Before going to Alcatel Asia Pacific, he spent seven years working for Alcatel in Brazil and Mexico and was vice president of the fixed networks division for Central and Latin America. Prior to joining Alcatel, Mr. Van Den Abeele worked at Andersen Consulting in several countries in Europe and on the deregulation of the European telecom industry in the early 1990s.