 inventory and configuration management challenge. The impacts are overwhelming, but consider some basic issues that will arise in a real-time environment. With SO much equipment and SO many customers and services being moved around the network and reorganized, categorized, and SO on, data errors are bound to occur. Maybe a new IP address is not properly associated with the correct account in the billing system and a customer is wrongly billed. Perhaps a policy server is not updated correctly and a host of customers are left without access to their ISPs or to lucrative, value-added content. These scenarios can all translate into poor service delivery, inaccurate or lost billing and unhappy customers. The fundamental point is that the cable environment will increase the already difficult challenges tied to customer data and service Chapter 3 - Automating the Internet Infrastructure Supply Chain management, and these challenges are just beginning to be addressed in the OSS marketplace. Voice Services Voice will be a critical part of many cable operators' service offerings. Though some have pursued traditional, circuit switched telephony, many plan to or are integrating voice-over-IP (VoIP) services into their networks, in alignment with the much-anticipated DOCSIS 1.1 specification that includes the QoS functions to support voice. To offer voice services, cable operators will take on many of the OSS challenges associated with telephony plus the QoS concerns inherent with IP. From a high-level infrastructure point of view, cable operators that offer voice services will need to install VoIP switches, VoIP-PSTN gateways, signaling managers, and media gateways to handle service hand-offs from cable networks to circuit-switched voice networks. They also will have to interface with network databases to assign customers' long-distance carriers or register them for emergency 911 services. In addition to IP address management, they will have to adopt telephone number management databases and processes. Cable operators offer