Open standards. Plug and play. Off the shelf. Interoperability.

These are all good things, the kind of phrases that give service providers a warm, fuzzy feeling about deploying new technology. But realistically, every innovation -- whether a service, a feature, a functionality or a totally new way of doing things -- starts off as anything but all of the above.

Take a well-known legacy technology such as Sonet. It started life as a set of standards designed to let service providers break free of proprietary transport -- and accomplish some other worthy goals as well -- but the earliest deployments of Sonet tended to be very vendor-specific. So much so that before long, there was something called the Sonet Interoperability Forum designed to promote real plug-and-play among equipment vendors. Even as service providers tried to push vendors for more standardized deployments, however, they were also pushing to get Sonet gear into their network to handle the oncoming rush of data traffic demand.

This seemingly inescapable tension between the drive to deploy and the need for plug-and-play applies to IPTV as well. As I note in this newsletter, however, there is already significant progress in the area of integration as more equipment vendors are taking it on themselves -- and seeing that it is in their best interests -- to partner up and do the necessary integration. That can only be good news for the industry overall, and particularly for service providers that don't have the market power to drive vendor behavior by themselves.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.