Notes:

Imagine we are in some liberalised telecoms market at some point in the future. We are likely to find at least one major network operator - that is, a core network of large switches and high speed transmission capacity. We’ll call that Network Operator No1 (perhaps it’s BT). But BT won’t be the only one.

There’s bound to be competition, and here we have, say, France Telecom, and we’ll show Deutsche Telekom, too, in the core network business. Of course, each network is based on IN technology.

Because each operator wants to carry as much traffic as possible they will interconnect with each other like this.

There’s little point in having a core network unless you have someone to provide services to run on it and to sell to end-user customers and so we will show some Service Providers, SP1 and SP2 who might or might not be part of the same company that runs the core network - that is, they might or might not be vertically integrated. And because they will wish to sell their services as widely as possible it’s likely that they will wish to interconnect with as many network operators as they can.

Of course, you can’t deliver service to the end user unless you have a connection to him, and that connection is provided by one or more Local Loop Operators.

Those local loop operators will want to take services from as many sources as possible and so they will connect to more than one network operator.

At this level, we can show the private network operator, too, who is also likely to want connectivity to more than one core network

We mustn't forget the end user, of course

We now have the bones of the model and we can begin to use it to illustrate some of the regulatory concepts. Here we have accounting separation and here we have the service level agreement