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In a previous post, The new network dogma: Has the wheel turned full circle?, I wrote about the now common perception that the mix of technologies that forms the basis of a service provider’s Next Generation Network (NGN) is considered to be done and dusted. This is because network technologies are now wholly dominated by IP-based protocols. In itself the wide-scale adoption of IP has been transformational for the carrier industry, but at the heart of this domination lays a major ‘zero-sum game’ dichotomy where the gains are offset by an equal, if not greater, loss.

What has caused this dichotomy? Today’s IP and MPLS networks have to manage bursty and unpredictable IP traffic over a layer-1 network that, regardless of the protocol, is composed of fixed bandwidth connections. This has lead to the creation of a family of ever-more complex protocols that aim to ‘micro-manage’ IP traffic at layers 2 / 2.5 and 3. In the above posting, it was suggested that today’s IP networks could be considered to be “over engineered” and often seems to act like children with tantrums.

In practice, many network service providers have baulked at deploying these complex protocols and have turned to the ‘simple’ concept of over-provisioning where bandwidth is thrown at the network to ensure adequate Quality of Service (QoS) for their business customers. However, over-provisioning maybe considered to be simple to deploy and manage, but it comes together with innately high deployment costs and low efficiency. This is because the expensive network equipment port and transport bandwidth headroom that is required to handle bursts is not used for much of the time. It seems that a network architect or planning engineer is in a no-win situation and have to choose between the costly simplicity of over-provisioning or the complexity of a micro managing the network.

This no-win situation is further compounded by other factors. First, there is the shift in the mix of applications carried by IP from non real-time file transfer type traffic such as emails and web pages, for which IP was originally intended for, to real-time services such as VoIP or streamed video services. This shift demands sophisticated application QoS control capabilities, increasing the cost and complexity of providing IP services.

On top of this change, the overall volume of service traffic continues to increase apace, at much greater rate than the customers’ spending can increase. These factors, on their part, would require massively scalable IP service delivery infrastructure with radically reduced cost per Gbps of service capacity. This demand for simplicity and cost-efficiency seems to be in direct contrast to the need to guarantee deterministic QoS for the emerging realtime and interactive IP applications.

Taken together, it appears that these pressing requirements cannot be solved by either of the traditional means of over-engineering (leading to unmanageable complexity) or by over-provisioning (leading to decreasing utilization and increasing capacity costs).

Thus, even if the NGN technology plans were once considered done deal, the end-user application demands and the harsh economics cause there to be, as much as ever, need for innovations that concentrate on delivering both network cost-efficiency and performance improvements. I would suggest that if a more open approach was taken on network architecture and business model options then competitive advantage can be gained for those service providers who are willing to consider new approaches. Perhaps through innovation, the concept of ‘brute-force’ over-provisioning can be made to be seen as one of yesterday’s architectural strategies?

In this vein, I’d like to take the opportunity to write about one company that has taken a highly innovative approach to address improved efficiency in next generation networking. Moreover, their business model is that of a service provider rather than a technology vendor. You don’t often come across a service provider that bases its business on internally developed and patented innovative technology, Optimum Communications Services (OCS) ⁽¹⁾ is one that has done just that. To quote the opening paragraph on their home page:

The real-time self-optimizing, self-configuring broadband VPN and multi-service backbone network solutions of Optimum Communications Services (OCS) combine the performance and security of a private network with the economies of shared Internet infrastructure. With OCS’ Intelligent Transport Network™ (ITN) solutions, performance and cost are not a trade-off; the efficiency of ITN results in both maximized performance and minimized cost.

The last sentence should be enough to intrigue any service provider CTO, COO or CFO and want to find out more.

OCS’ business model

It’s always difficult to know whether to talk about technology or business models first as it depends on whether the reader is a technologist or a commercial manager. In this case however, I feel that it is quite important to explain the business model first as OCS have chosen to be a service provider rather than be a technology provider (these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

Although OCS have developed innovative and patented technology ⁽²⁾, they plan to bring this to market by offering a wholesale network connectivity and/or optimisation services that benefit from their technology developments. They offer these in two principal flavours:

Wholesale service: With customers who do not desire to invest in, own or operate their own fibre-optic networks and customarily buy their required network connectivity services from network service providers, OCS will operate as a traditional service provider. They will bring a set of services to the market that will benefit their customers from both cost-efficiency and service improvement perspectives. OCS will manage the customer’s network services enhanced through the use of their own technology innovations applied to off-the-shelf leased optical wavelengths. Examples of organisations could be systems integrators, who could use OCS’ service as a more cost-efficient alternative to traditional leased lines or wavelengths in an enterprise end-customer’s Wide Area Network (WAN) application, or they could be value-added service providers such as CDNs, ASPs, wireless service providers using OCS’ service to interconnect their POPs, data-centres, switching centres and network access points. In this case, OCS is acting as a wholesale service provider.

Optimisation as service: For organizations with a significant investment in their own fibre optic network capacity, OCS can provide a network throughput maximization service as a service provider and will operate and manage the its optimisation-layer technology on behalf of the customer though, in this case, over fibre-optic wavelength capacity provided by the customer.

Background

Even after more than a decade of packet traffic driven network technology and service offering development, and while most of the network traffic already is packet based i.e. inherently of variable bandwidth nature, it is strange but true that the variable bandwidth packet traffic is still being delivered over fixed-bandwidth physical layer network connections, regardless of the protocols used. These planning and technology deficiencies unavoidable lead to a high level of structural inefficiency because a high percentage of costly bandwidth remains unused for most of the time. This wasted bandwidth is called Stranded Bandwidth and can be found in any network even if is an all IP network or the strategically ‘ideal’ Next Generation Network (NGN) and represents money down the drain for most operators. (Picture credit: ISOC)

So what are the technology innovations that lie behind these service offerings?

OCS’ technology

OCS uses its patented technology as a principal embedded component in its wholesale and optimisation services so OCS does not sell technology as such. However, it is worthwhile looking at how OCS achieves such significant network efficiency improvements.

OCS’ approach was to go back to basics and realise that the root cause for the ever-increasing complexity of traffic management at packet layers is the need to try to mitigate the impacts of structural inefficiency originating from the use of non-variable bit-rate layer-1 connections for delivering variable bandwidth packet-switched services.

Instead of continuing down the path of increasing complexity via various packet-layer (i.e. layer 2 and above) network micro-management techniques, a more elegant and more sustainable, architectural solution could be achieved by delivering a self-optimising layer-1, to achieve all the efficiencies there are to gain with packet-switching, while at the same time providing per-customer-dedicated connectivity that is deterministic with high QoS and security. Specifically, if the most modern existing layer-1 standard, SDH, could be enhanced through the addition of real-time dynamic bandwidth allocation driven by the real-time traffic requirements between each access port of a network, then it would be possible to achieve a number of benefits, one of which is to eradicate stranded bandwidth. OCS calls this concept Adaptive-Mesh networking, implemented as OCS’ Intelligent Transport Network™ (ITN) technology.

An Adaptive-Mesh based network is fully real-time self optimising so there is no ‘underutilised’ or stranded capacity, as the capacity allocation across the entire network is continuously optimised.

The purchase of OCS’ commercial services enables globally maximized network revenue-generating service delivery capacity and provides an improved network performance using several mechanisms:

Dynamic bandwidth allocation at network physical layer (layer-1): An Adaptive-Mesh network provides a full mesh of dynamic bandwidth layer-1 connections among a group of network ingress and egress points. An Adaptive-Mesh network provides non-oversubscribed any-to-any connectivity among the customer sites that it interconnects, via providing a sub-pool of network capacity for transport of data from the network ingress points per each egress point of the network. Each such sub-pool within an Adaptive-Mesh has the same total bit rate as its corresponding network egress point. These sub-pools work as wide-area multiplexers in that they provide a dynamic-bandwidth layer-1 connection from each of their source nodes to their destination node, and are called Adaptive-Concatenation Multiplexer Buses (AMBs). OCS has implemented AMBs to support such dynamic bandwidth source node specific circuits with STS-1 capacity increments that are re-optimised for every new STS row period, i.e., at rate of 9 (rows per frame) times 8000 (frames/second) = 72000 optimization cycles per second, providing per second bandwidth granularity of 50Mbps/72000 i.e. finer than 1kb/s. Thus, for a 10Gbps destination access point of Adaptive-Mesh connecting to a 10Gbps port connected to a customer’s switch/router, there will be an STS-192 AMB, which provides a dynamic bandwidth, Adaptive-Concatenated STS-X channel for each of the source access points of the Adaptive-Mesh that needs direct layer-1 connectivity to the given destination.

In addition to the dynamically multiplexed layer-1 data plane, the AMB provides a real-time control plane to optimise the allocation of the STS-1 timeslots of the AMB among its source node specific STS-X circuits. To accomplish that, the destination node of AMB receives, for every new STS row period, capacity demand info from the source points of the AMB, and in response the destination node re-optimises the allocation of the STS-1 timeslots on the AMB among the source points, ensuring that all source points get their requested portion of the AMB capacity at least up to their fair share, and as much of the total capacity as possible while fairly meeting also other requests.

The AMB control plane signalling is carried in the otherwise unused STS-1 overhead fields, and the same optimisation process is repeated for every STS row cycle on the STS-N bus, causing the capacity allocation of each AMB, and thus the entire Adaptive-Mesh network, to be always optimised and the network traffic throughput thus continuously maximised.

Thus the Adaptive-Concatenation of OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh, apparently for the first time ever, has enabled supporting burstable traffic (the desired aspect of Variable Bit Rate requirements) with minimum throughput guarantees (the desired aspect of Constant Bit Rate requirements).

The entire optimisation process of Adaptive-Mesh is furthermore fully hardware automated and transparent for the customer nodes which are in full control of the Adaptive-Mesh capacity allocation, as it is the traffic loads between the customer nodes that drive the capacity allocation optimisation of Adaptive-Mesh, and the customer has the ability to control the traffic loads among its nodes connected to an Adaptive-Mesh network.

Importantly, this method of layer-1 dynamic bandwidth allocation does not require packet processing / switching at the backbone network interfaces but only at the access port’s bandwidth (e.g., avoids need for packet layer logic at 10Gbps ring interfaces in case of 1Gbps access, as well as avoids need for packet level logic for 100/160Gbps transport interfaces in case of 10/40Gbps access). This dynamic bandwidth layer-1 circuit based packet transport of ITN significantly, in the order of 10:1, reduces the cost of packet layer processing compared to the use of a traditional packet-switching networks, which need to process packets at the backbone line speed as shown in the diagramme on the left.

The diagram also shows why a typical layer-3/2 router/switch connected to 10Gbps backbone and 1Gbps access interfaces requires a total packet processing and switching matrix capacity that is multiple times greater than the sum of its access port capacities and that most of the packet layer logic capacity is consumed by the backbone network interfaces. As backbone capacities rise to 100/160Gbps and beyond, this requirement can make conventional packet-switching equipment very, very expensive to develop and manufacture and that would unavoidably be reflected in the end-user price.

Innovative topology: A second opportunity for optimisation lies at a topology level. For example, take a simple closed 5-node network that is functioning as a service provider’s optical network. The requirement is that each node has a total traffic exchange capacity with other nodes of doubled 10Gbps, any breakdown of which aggregate between the four source/destination node specific connections needs to be dynamically supported (based on real-time inter-area traffic load variations) in order to not block revenue-generating traffic. As shown in the diagram, implementing this connectivity requirement with conventional, non-adaptive network physical layer, would require in total ten such bi-directional mesh connections, each of which would need to support 10Gbps in order to not limit the network throughput. The doubling of the mesh for protection purposes would require in total 20 such layer-1/0 connections, which conventionally would be mapped to 20 optical wavelength loops on a fibre ring.

The efficiency gain of OCS’ ITN solution for this example lies in the fact that it can provide an equivalent fully meshed dual-provisioned non-blocking connectivity using only a single wavelength resource, where the conventional architecture needed twenty of them on the same circular fibre route. Simple mathematics says that the minimum aggregate ring bandwidth required to support 5 sites with the required 10Gbps access with non-blocking connectivity is M(N-1)/2 where M = port bandwidth and N = node count. Therefore 10(5-1)/2 = 20Gbps is, in theory, sufficient, provided that the network capacity is continuously kept optimally allocated among the source-destination node connections, ITN, as so far unique and patented technology, is able to meet this condition. With dual connectivity, as is the case with this example, 40Gbps of ring bandwidth is adequate and such a signal carried over a single wavelength. Thus OCS’ ITN realises a 20:1 reduction in physical network capacity costs. The financial consequence could mean savings of several million Pounds or Dollars per year, if not more, for even modest size network contracts.

Why should this be so? In this five site example, on any section of the 40Gbps OC-768 ring, both 20Gbps halves of the ring can support two individual 10Gbps STS-192 Adaptive-concatenation Multiplexer Buses (AMBs), each of which provides a dynamically optimised bandwidth STS-X circuit per each source node along the AMB to its destination node (ITN Interface Module, IM) and there are two destination nodes to be reached on any given ring section along either ring direction, as per the diagramme. Thus, with AMBs, non-oversubscribed any-to-any connectivity among five sites with 40Gbps of traffic exchange capacity at each can be provided over 20Gbps of ring capacity, and 40Gbps ring can support two such (protecting) AMB mesh networks.

The key result of this is that ITN is able to provide a full 2 x 2 x 10Gbps = 40Gbps of traffic throughput between any of the five network sites — both without the packet processing of conventional hop-by-hop packet-switching network, and without the multiple times higher number of wavelengths a traditional solution would require. This means that a fully layer-1 meshed non-blocking network has been implemented at a fraction of the price that would be needed without using OCS’ ITN.

Cut-through routing: The advent of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) standards defined a new mechanism for packet forwarding in routers and enabled the rollout of connection-oriented networks. Connection-oriented data networks emulated the way that paths were set up in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) networks. This involves setting up a path prior to sending packets across the network (The rise and maturity of MPLS) and enabled the removal of the ATM layer from live networks that originally provided this capability.

Without MPLS, Carrier Ethernet or ATM, both the link layer and routing headers of each packet needed to be analysed at each node it passed through to determine where next to send it. Packets certainly arrived at their destination reliably (dependent on re-transmission by layer-4 protocols) but with unpredictable delays. We are all familiar with this from the Internet where packets sometimes need to transit 20 nodes or ‘hops’ before arriving at your computer. This may be acceptable for non-real-time services such as email but is a killer for real-time services such as VoIP or video conferencing.

With layer-2 or 2.5 switching or forwarding techniques such as FR, ATM, Ethernet or MPLS, the layer-3 routing and processing can be avoided at intermediate network nodes, allowing more deterministic packet delivery with normally fixed routes with reduced delay variation. However, layer-2 or 2.5 packet forwarding techniques cannot avoid packet (or cell) layer processing, queuing and switching at the intermediate nodes and for all interfaces, without losing the bandwidth efficiency and flexibility advantages (vs. traditional layer-1 multiplexing) that those techniques were developed for. Such hop-by-hop packet-switching, besides wasting most of the packet processing logic for transit traffic at each node, moreover unavoidably exposes the packet traffic to consequences of variable levels of congestion (i.e. increasing delay, jitter and packet-loss probability with each packet hop), as well as for ongoing security concerns in such packet-layer shared backbone environments. Thus, the conventional layer-2 or 2.5 forwarding overlay network solutions could be considered as half-solutions, with their set of trade-offs compared to e.g. L3 VPNs.

The Adaptive-Concatenation based adaptive-bandwidth layer-1 of ITN however allows avoiding layer-2+ packet layer functionality altogether at the intermediate nodes along a path of a packet without losing any of the maximum achievable bandwidth efficiency or flexibility of packet-switching, and without having to mix traffic from unrelated customer or application networks in the same physical layer connections or packet processors. Moreover, since OCS’ innovation is based on the physical layer of the networks, its benefits apply just the same for all services delivered over any layer-2+ protocol stacks.

This means that packets can pass through any number of intermediate nodes at full line speed without being slowed down or the service quality in any way degraded. The number of hops could be as low as two or three whereas without this capability it might be twenty or thirty with L2/3 techniques targeting the same bandwidth efficiency. What is also interesting is that the QoS experienced by these packets delivered over Adaptive-Mesh networks is of the very highest achievable in any telecommunications network as it is derived from the direct L1 circuit based transport across multiple intermediate nodes, which otherwise would need to perform delay, jitter and packet drop probability increasing L2/3 processing, in order to target similar bandwidth efficiency as is achieved with the Adaptive Concatenation.

Compatible access: OCS’ Intelligent Transport Network Interface Modules (IM) units can forward packets at any packet layer protocol forwarding identifiers (e.g. MPLS Labels), and support common standard router/switch interfaces such as Packet-over-SONET Ethernet. OCS’ services are straightforward and can be deployed in multiple scenarios such as the two described below.

Corporate, ASP, CDN or wireless service provider backbone networks: An OCS Adaptive-Mesh can be deployed for a application, information or communications service provider backbone or a corporate Wide Area Network (WAN) application over any fibre optic network and interconnect any layer-3 or layer-2 routers / switches of the customer.

As an OCS’ WAN solution requires only the minimum theoretical network capacity necessary to meet specified inter-site throughput etc. QoS requirements for a customer network, it is able to provide a highly cost-optimised solution.

Another benefit is the cost reduction accruing from not needing backbone bandwidth ports on a WAN’s edge routers in case of ring topology, or from elimination of need for core routers or switches in case of hub-and-spoke topology. In the example in the diagram above, only two 1Gbps ports are required to connect to OCS’ IM units over the WAN interfaces. As previously presented, conventional packet-switching network architecture would require in the order of ten times more packet processing and switching capacity per node, due to the need to handle traffic at packet-level also on the (e.g.10Gbps) backbone network interfaces.

Telecom service provider backbone network upgrades: With a service provider who currently owns at least some optical network capacity, the OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh will work as a self-operating optimisation layer, between standard WDM Optical Add-Drop Multiplexors (OADMs) and the edge routers. (Note: A service provider does not need to add any new equipment to their networks due to OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh based network upgrade, as OCS provides the Adaptive-Mesh connectivity as a managed service, not as an equipment vendor)

An OCS solution often reduces fibre-optic wavelength capacity requirements for a given inter-router throughput requirements to a small fraction, such as to 1/10 or less, multiplying the time in years before the service provider would need to invest in additional WDM/fibre capacity, or alternatively, allowing economical use of per-customer-contract leased fibre/wavelength capacity via the Adaptive-Mesh based optimisation.

In case of upgrading packet ring topology for Adaptive-Mesh, the edge routers do not need to be upgraded for the new backbone network transport rate blades, while the network traffic throughputs get multiplied, so a significant reduction in router cost could be experienced in addition to the other architecture benefits discussed above. With upgrade to Adaptive-Mesh architecture from packet ring, each edge router is relieved from having to process the pass-through ring traffic, with the entire capacity of each edge router getting more effectively used for its local access traffic.

If the service provider buys in additional wavelengths to extend the reach of their network backbone or take over an enterprise’s network through an outsourcing contract, the use of OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh as an up-front-cost-free, transparent optimisation layer could result in considerable savings over the use of the traditional architectures.

Benefit inventory

Before all carriers jumped on the IP bandwagon in the late 90s, those that were prepared to ‘think the unthinkable’ and look towards trying a new approach were the first to see the benefits. This not only applied to network technologies but to applications as well. This is well demonstrated by the transition from frame relay services to IP-VPN services (Where now frame relay?). It’s an easy decision to follow the crowd and it’s often not a bad thing to do. It’s safe and it’s difficult to get things completely wrong. But when everyone has followed the same path there is little differentiation between competitive players. Everyone has the same services and makes the same promises and prices fall due to natural competition in an over-crowded market. It’s now very difficult for any carrier to say “Our network is the best!” when that is also the strap-line for all their competitors as well.

There comes a time when forward thinking individuals and companies need to start to think the unthinkable again as was the case in the late 90s and to look again how their company could be made to stand out from the crowd. Maybe some of the benefits listed below for the use of OCS’ ITN could deliver some of that now hard to achieve customer-visible differentiation?

Flexibility: An Adaptive-Mesh service can be adopted by any organisation having a large network including enterprises or service providers whether they own a fibre-optic network or not, while producing similar, in the order of 10-fold cost efficiency gain.

Serious complexity reduction: An alternative approach to over-provisioning is the deployment of fine-grain traffic management techniques such as Deep Packet Inspection and micro flow policing. It could be considered that this really adds to the complexity of an IP / MPLS network which could make it less transparent and ultimately more unreliable. Because of this concern, a high proportion of carriers err on the side of simplicity and stick with over-provisioning. It seems today that a network architect or planning engineer is in a no-win situation and have to choose between the costly simplicity of over-provisioning or the complexity of a micro managing the network. OCS could provide an alternative way forward without the weaknesses of either approach, without having to replace existing infrastructures, but actually making optimised use of it

No need for over-provisioning: Over provisioning a live network is seen to be such a simple way to ensure high QoS for customer traffic that many carriers have this as their prime solution for traffic engineering. One downside of this strategy is the risk of wasting much money by having to invested in under-utilised capacity needed to support occasional bursts of traffic. Planning networks based on the real-time self-optimising Adaptive-Mesh architecture removes this downside as Adaptive-Mesh can accommodate any burstiness of traffic patterns without the costly need for over-provisioning.

Reduce architecture tradeoffs: The removal of tradeoffs in network architecture by providing all the benefits of fully-meshed networks without the consequent costs.

Helping to scale: The use of ITN reduces the challenge of the ’scaling conundrum’ allowing the scaling of a highly meshed network without the usual consequence of a potential exponential rise in cost. This is always quoted as the #1 problem when talking about meshed networks.

CAPEX reduction: The adoption of an OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh solution could result in considerable saving in financial outlay by reducing the number of wavelengths needed leading to a reduction of the required number of core router/switch and OADM ports. This could be reflected in the value of outsource bids and result in more successful bids. It should not be forgotten that most of the outsourced networks are still run as separate networks after a successful bid, even though most carriers and integrators say they will reduce overheads by integrating networks. People are integrated but networks are usually not. Adaptive-Mesh, as an optimisation layer, can be applied to these individually run networks to save cost over the period of the contract. Moreover, Adaptive-Mesh enables fully realising the bandwidth efficiency benefits of packet-switching without having to mix unrelated customer or application traffic in the same physical layer network capacity pools, thus maintaining the simplicity and security benefits of layer-1 isolation between different customer contracts while achieving optimised network resource usage efficiency.

Network Administration and Operations: Due to the reduced overall complexity of an OCS’ adaptive network approach, there could be considerable opportunity to reduce administration and operational costs.

Improved QoS without increasing costs: For a global enterprise, Adaptive-Mesh based WAN services provide an opportunity to significantly increase the QoS and performance of their distributed business applications by minimizing network hop count, while optimizing network utilization efficiency. This is particularly important where there is a high proportion of VoIP, video-conferencing or other time critical, e.g. financial transactions related traffic.

Separating traffic into different Classes of Service (CoS) on packet networks is usually accomplished through the use of weighting algorithms and buffer queues and this could lead to degradation of service when a link is overloaded. The Adaptive-Mesh architecture of OCS’ ITN uses a simpler and more understandable method of segregating traffic by placing traffic with different destinations into completely different sets of layer-1 isolated NxSTS-1 sub-pools called Adaptive-concatenation Multiplexer Buses (AMBs), which moreover provide dynamically optimised bandwidth STS-X layer-1 circuits per each source node (IM). The IMs finally map packets on their STS-X circuits on the AMBs according to the priority order of the packetx as indicated by their adjacent customer (MPLS) routers. Adaptive-Mesh thus achieves maximized network usage efficiency while providing layer-1-circuit transport based, highest possible QoS.

Potential customers of OCS

Examples of potential customer types below shows that there is no shortage of potential beneficiaries.

Large enterprises: Large Multinational Companies (MNCs) who operate their own private inter-site networks and buy in wide area network optical connectivity services in the form of SDH / SONET or wavelength services — in particular, media, entertainment, financial and high-technology sector organisations that require the highest levels of performance, QoS and security. Enterprises using OCS services could benefit from a significant reduction in bought-cost per Gbps and improved performance.

Business parks: Newer business parks often have optical fibre networks centrally managed by the landlord, and/or plans for such. The use of Adaptive-Mesh architecture in such campus networks for communities of interest could significantly reduce implementation and management costs that could be passed on to their tenants.

Software as a Service (SaaS), Content Distribution Services and Search: All business-class applications service providers operating at a global level currently have to operate and manage their own global networks. The reason for this is that if they are to provide the required performance and QoS for their paying corporate customers, they need to bypass the Internet and deliver services using their own private networks where they are able to control and manage the network. For these types of applications, Adaptive-Mesh allows the ASPs to get, as a managed service, the performance and controllability of private network with the Gbps/$ cost-efficiency of Internet transit service.

System integrators: System integrators provide network outsource services to enterprises and must demonstrate that they can manage customers’ networks at a lower costs while improving performance and quality. In practice, this is a tough act to deliver on and will always present a major challenge to the successful outsourcer. The adoption of an OCS’ service, as a more cost-efficient, but equal, high-QoS alternative to traditional, leased line based services, could provide an additional weapon to help win new contract bids and really reduce the operating costs of already won out-sourced networks.

Virtual Network Operators (VNOs): VNOs provide connectivity services such as IP-VPNs to enterprise customers in competition to traditional carriers and system integrators. The difference is that they do not own their own networks and buy in connectivity services from global, regional or incumbent carriers. For VNOs, OCS Adaptive-Mesh architecture could provide a dedicated, private network like high quality backbone solution integrated over leased wavelengths, with multiple times higher cost-efficiency achieved due to that Adaptive-Mesh only requires a small fraction of the wavelength capacity, compared to the alternative architectures, to meet the given SLA terms for the wholesale customer contract. In many cases, the use of OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh services can allow the customer such as VNO to get dedicated capacity based, premium QoS wholesale network services at cost per Gbps lower than even the bulk Internet transit services.

Mobile operators: Most mobile operator networks now manage their own private MPLS data networks. This is not only because of the rising use of mobile Internet data services but also due to their business plan needs to offer triple or quadruple play services that includes consumer Internet accesses. Moreover, traditional SDH connectivity services are used to connect cell sites back to the central Mobile Switching Centre (MSC) and represents a significant component of their costs. OCS’ Adaptive-Mesh services allow multiplying the capacities of mobile core networks without associated capital costs, while reducing the level of ongoing operating costs, and while allowing efficient multi-service integration over high-performance, realtime optimised, dedicated layer-1 capacity based backhaul and backbone networks.

Fixed network operators: Clearly any traditional carrier who operates a traditional fibre optic network could utilise OCS services to help reduce the level of CAPEX and OPEX – particularly when looking at extending their network

One alternative approach

Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), originally derived from Cisco’s Dynamic Packet Transport (DPT), RPR is now subject to industry standardisation called IEEE 802.17. Based on a pair of ‘counter direction’ fibre optic rings, RPR offers hop-by-hop packet-switched connectivity on fibre or wavelength ring. It is based on a type of packet-layer (i.e. L2+) bandwidth allocation called Spatial Reuse Protocol and appropriate sub 50ms restoration objectives.

RPR is particularly aimed at metro networks, however one of the key issues is whether its deployment is cost competitive to traditional hub-and-spoke approaches, which consume more layer-1/0 bandwidth, but save on router/switch hardware costs and provide better QoS due to fewer packet-hops. In relation to OCS’ approach, which also provides minimised hop count based premium QoS, RPR does not achieve any higher bandwidth efficiency, so its architectural difference with Adaptive-Mesh is reduced to that RPR requires multiple times more packet processing and switching capacity at its nodes, causing higher cost and inferior scalability. Also RPR networks have multiple times higher packet-hop counts, possibly hurting QoS control. Unlike RPR, or any other purely packet-switched techniques, OCS does not need to process packets at backbone rates and uses an inherently higher QoS, more scalable and lower cost method of providing dynamic bandwidth allocation optimisation at layer-1.

Being in effect a packet based solution, RPR provides a packet buffering Class of Service (CoS) capability for all traffic on the rings to manage traffic in case of congestion. OCS take a much more fundamental way of segregating traffic by placing traffic with different destinations into completely different sets of aggregated NxSTS-1 ‘lanes’ in the network called Adaptive-concatenation Multiplexer Buses (AMBs). Using this approach, it is quite easy for potential user organisations to understand how it works and have more faith that a deterministic QoS can be achieved.

Naturally, the fundamentals of this comparison of Adaptive-Mesh to RPR applies to any other packet-ring type techniques, or generally any node-by-node packet-switching networks such as Carrier Ethernet, just the same.

Roundup

In The new network dogma: Has the wheel turned full circle? I wrote about possible opportunities to simplify enterprise and service provider networks through looking at new innovative approaches. The world has pretty much converged on a single vision and protocol set for Next Generation Networks (NGN) centred on network intelligence being based in layer-2.5 and above. Although this has much merit, I detect that many carriers want to keep their networks as simple as possible and have actively resisted deploying some of the newer protocols aimed at micro-managing individual packet flows. Maybe, layer 2, 2.5, 3 (and higher level) protocol approaches are actually getting too complicated?

OCS have introduced a concept that has much merit which could lead to considerable network simplification and all the benefits that could bring. This is in no way a battle based on religion. An OCS’ solution, based on real-time, network byte-timeslot granular data throughput maximisation, is highly complementary to macro-level, and non/near realtime layer-2.5+ traffic engineering techniques, and since OCS’ innovation is based on the fundamental physical layer (layer-1) of networks, its use benefits all services running over any layer-2+ protocol stacks. Importantly, non-carrier networks, such as enterprise WANs, could also benefit from many of the features inherent in an Adaptive-mesh network that is not available to them at present.

If you would like to learn more about OCS, visit their News page where you can download a number of papers that go into more detail than is possible here. If you are an enterprise networker, the Yankee Group report below is highly recommended.

Innovation to Transform Market for Enterprise Networks

⁽¹⁾ I should take the opportunity to declare a personal interest in OCS in that I am an advisor to the company. However, OCS has not in any manner sponsored, validated or endorsed this column and all opinions expressed or implied (other than direct quotes) are independent opinions of the author, and not of OCS.

⁽²⁾ OCS’ technology patents can be downloaded from here: http://www.pat2pdf.org once there, search for US patent numbers 7333511, 7254138 and 7349414.

Well, I’m amazed yet again at the world we live in. Being of a certain age, I listen to a lot of talk radio in the form of BBC’s Radio 4. One would have thought that this most conservative of stations would generally remain unaffected by modern world Internet issues. How wrong could I be?

I have read much over the years about the contentious subject of Digital Rights Management but I cannot say it has generally encroached itself  into my cosy small world. However, I guess this is all about to change. I get used to the many service drop-outs on the Radio 4 service (I’m suffering from it now) but this is something else!

Here I was sitting at my computer at 12:15 on Thursday 4th September 2008 replying to emails, talking to my wife and half listening to a the programme that was interviewing a Google employee, D J Collins of Google’s public affairs team about their controversial agreement to restrict content when the company operates in China. Suddenly, right in the middle, the flow hiccoughed and was replaced by a repetitive female voice saying over and over again “Due to rights restrictions we are currently unable to bring you this programme”! You can listen to the message here if interested.

I’ve never, ever, heard this message before and as a BBC licence fee payer I would never expect to hear this message in the UK. I have read about the restrictions the BBC imposes on content to none UK listeners who have not paid a TV license fee, but I’m in the UK so this would not apply.

After five minutes of this annoying voice I dashed to the other room and turned on the Sky Radio 4 stream and just caught a presenter explaining that Internet listeners should now have their service resumed. He said that the issue was caused because a report that was recording in Beijing included a section about the Paralympics and that the BBC did not have International rights so the BBC could not broadcast the report over the Internet! It makes you wonder doesn’t it? I guess the BBC will not be showing Paralympic events on the Internet then. ⁽¹⁾

Well, I have to say I’m amazed if that is actually the case. I’m event more amazed if it is. Are we, as Internet listeners, going to be subjected to this on a regular basis when Radio 4 transmits items that they do not have the appropriate rights to broadcast material on the Internet? Will whole programmes be block? BBC TV is available on the Internet will watchers be blanked out as well?

It will be interesting to see what the on-line recording of today’s You and Yours will contain. The mind boggles! Well, having listened to recording and I can now say they have included 15 minutes of “Due to rights restrictions we are currently unable to bring you this program” – surprise, surprise!

⁽¹⁾ Note from Sports City: “For those fans of the Paralympic Games who do not live within the territories of the rightsholding broadcasters, there will be coverage available on www.ParalympicSport.TV , the IPC’s internet TV channel. Daily news and highlight shows will be offered on demand as well as live coverage wherever possible. More than 150 hours of Paralympic sports are already available on the channel, 24/7 free of charge, all over the world. Additionally, daily news will also be shown on the YouTube channel of ParalympicSport.TV at www.youtube.com/ParalympicSportTV . Fans of Paralympic Sport can also join the group “Your Paralympic Moment” and upload video clips of their special Paralympic Moment. The best clips will be released on ParalympicSport.TV after the Games.”

“An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true”

When innovators proposed Internet Protocol (IP) as the universal protocol for carriers in the mid 90s, they met with furious resistance from the traditional telecommunications community. This post asks whether the wheel has now turned full circle with new innovative approaches often receiving the same reception.

Like many others, I have found the telecommunications industry so very interesting and stimulating over the last decade. There have been so many profound changes that it is hard to indentify with the industry that existed prior to the new religion of IP that took hold in the late 90s. In those balmy days the industry was commercially and technically controlled by the robust world standards of the Public Switched Telecommunications Services (PSTN).

In some ways it was a gentleman’s industry where incumbent monopoly carriers ruled their own lands and had detailed inter-working agreements with other telcos to share the end-to-end revenue generated by each and every telephone call. To enable these agreements to work, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva spent decades defining the technical and commercial standards that greased the wheels. Life was relatively simple as there was only one standards body and one set of rules to abide by. The ITU is far from dead of course and the organisation went on to develop the highly successful GSM standard for mobile telephony and is still very active defining standards to this very day.

In those pre-IP days, the industry was believed to be at its nadir with high revenues, similarly high profits with every company having its place in the universe. Technology had not significantly moved on for decades ( though this does an injustice to the development of ATM and SDH/SONET) and there was quite a degree of complacency driven by a monopolistic mentality. Moreover, it was very much a closed industry in that individuals chose to spend their entire careers in telecommunications from a young age with few outsiders migrating into it. Certainly few individuals with an information technology background joined telcos as there was a significant mismatch in technology, skills and needs. It was not until the mid 90s, when the industry started to use computers by adopting Advanced Intelligent Networks (AIN) and Operational Software and Systems (OSS), that computer literate IT engineers and programmers saw new job opportunities and jumped aboard.

In many ways the industry was quite insular and had its own strong world view of where it was going. As someone once said, “the industry drank its own bathwater” and often chose to blinker out opposing views and changing reality. It is relatively easy to see how this came about with hindsight. How could an industry that was so insular embrace disruptive technology innovation with open arms? The management dogma was all about “We understand our business, our standards and our relationships. We are in complete control and things won’t change.”

Strong dogma dominated and was never more on show than in the debate about the adoption of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) standards that were needed to upgrade the industry’s switching networks. If ATM had been developed a decade earlier there would have never been an issue but unfortunately the timing could not have been worse as it coincided with the major uptake of IP in enterprises. When I first wrote about ATM back in 1993, IP was pretty much an unknown protocol in Europe. (The demise of ATM ). ATM and the telco industry lost that battle and IP has never looked back.

In reality it was not so much a battle but all out war. It was the telecommunications industry eyeball-to-eyeball with the IT industry. The old “we know best” dogma did not triumph and the abrupt change in industry direction led to severe trauma  in all sections of the industry. Many old-style telecommunications equipment vendors, who had focused on ATM with gusto, failed to adapt with many either writing off billions of Dollars or being sold at knock-down valuations. Of course, many companies made a killing. Inside telcos, commercial and engineering management who had spent decades at the top of their profession, found themselves floundering and over a fifteen year period a significant proportion of that generation of  management ended up leaving the industry.

The IP band wagon had started rolling and its unstoppable inertia has relentlessly driven the industry through to the current time. Interestingly, as I have covered in previous posts such as MPLS and the limitations of the Internet, not all the pre-IP technologies were dumped. This was particularly so with fundamental transmission related network technologies such as SDH / SONET (SDH, the great survivor). These technologies were 100% defined within the telecommunications world and provided capabilities that were wholly lacking in IP. IP may have been perfect for enterprises, but many capabilities were missing that were required if it was to be used as the bedrock protocol in the telecommunications industry. Such things as:

• Unlike telecommunications protocols, IP networks were proud that their networks were non-deterministic. This meant that packets would always find their way to the required destination even if the desired path faulted. In the IP world this was seen as a positive feature. Undoubtedly it was, but it also meant that it was not possible to predict the time it would take for a packet to transit a network. Even worse, a contiguous stream of packets could arrive at a destination via different paths. This was acceptable for e-mail traffic but a killer for real-time services like voice.
• Telecommunications networks required high reliability and resilience so that in event of any failure, automatic switchover to an alternate route would occur within several milliseconds so that even live telephone calls were not interrupted. In this situation IP would lackadaisically find another path to take and packets would eventually find their way to their destination (well maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but it does provide a good image of how IP worked!).
• Real time services require a very high Quality of Service (QoS) in that latency, delay, jitter and drop-out of packets need to be kept to an absolute minimum. This was, and is, a mandatory requirement for delivery of demanding voice services. IP in those days did not have the control signalling mechanisms to ensure this.
• If PSTN voice networks had one dominant characteristic – it was reliable. Telephone networks just could not go down. There were well engineered and extensively monitored so if any fault occurred comprehensive network management systems flagged it very quickly to enable operational staff to correct it or provide a work round. IP networks just didn’t have this level of capability of operational management systems.

These gaps in capabilities in the new IP-for-everything vision needed to be corrected pretty quickly, so a plethora of standards development was initiated through the IETF that remains in full flow to this day. I can still remember my amazement in the mid 1990s when I came across a company had come up with the truly innovative idea to combine the deterministic ability of ATM with an IP router that brought together the best of the old with the new still under-powered IP protocol (The phenomenon of Ipsilon). This was followed by Cisco’s and the IETF’s development of MPLS and all its progeny protocols. (The rise and maturity of MPLS and GMPLS and common control).

Let’s be clear, without these enhancements to basic IP, all the benefits the telecommunications world gained from focusing on IP would not have been realised. The industry should be making a huge sigh of relief as many of the required enhancements were not developed until after the wholesale industry adoption of IP. If IP itself had not been sufficiently adaptable, it could be conjectured that there would have been one of the biggest industry dead ends imaginable and all the ‘Bellheads’ would have been yelling “I told you so!”.

Is this the end of story?

So, that’s it then, it’s all done. Every carrier of every description, incumbent, alternate, global, regional, mobile, and virtual has adopted IP / MPLS and everything is hunky-dory. We have the perfect set of network standards and everything works fine. The industry has a clear strategy to transport all services over IP and the Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture will last for several decades.

This may very well turn out to be the case and certainly IP /MPLS will be the mainstream technology set for a long time to come and I still believe that this was one of the best decisions the industry took in recent times. However, I cannot help asking myself whether if we have not gone back to many of the same closed industry attitudes that drove it prior to the all-pervasive adoption of IP?

It seems to me that it is now not the ‘done thing’ to propose alternative network approaches or enhancements that do not exactly coincide with the now IP way of doing things for risk of being ‘flamed’. For me the key issue that should drive network architectures should be simplicity and nobody could use the term ’simple’ when describing today’s IP carrier networks. Simplicity means less opportunity for service failure and simplicity means lower cost operating regimes. In these days of ruthless management cost-cutting, any innovation that promises to simplify a network and thus reduce cost must have merit and should justify extensive evaluation – even if your favourite vender disagrees. To put it simply, simplicity cannot not come from deploying more and more complex protocols that micro-manage a network’s traffic.

Interestingly, in spite of there being a complete domination of public network cores by MPLS, there is still one major area where the use of MPLS is being actively questioned – edge and or metro networks. There is currently quite a vibrant discussion taking place concerning the over complexity of MPLS for use in metro and the possible benefits of using IP over Ethernet (Ethernet goes carrier grade with PBT / PBB-TE?). More on this later.

We should also not forget that telcos have never dropped other aspects of the pre-IP world. For example, the vast majority of telcos who own physical infrastructure still use that leading denizen of the pre-IP world, Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH or SONET) (SDH, the great survivor). This friendly dinosaur of a technology still holds sway at the layer-1 network level even though most signalling and connectivity technologies that sit upon it have been brushed aside by the IP family of standards. SDH’s partner in crime, ATM, was absorbed by IP through the creation of standards that replicated its capabilities in MPLS (deterministic routing) and MPLS-TE (fast rerouting). The absorption of SDH into IP was not such a great success as many of the capabilities of SDH could not effectively be replaced by layer-3 capabilities (though not for the want of trying!).

SDH is based on time division multiplexing (TDM), the pre-IP packet method of sharing a defined amount of bandwidth between a number of services running over an individual wavelength on a fibre optic cable. The real benefit of this multiplexing methodology is that it had proved to be ultra-reliable and offers the very highest level of Quality of Service available. SDH also has the in-built ability par-excellence to provide restoration of an inter-city optical cable in the case of major failure. One of SDH’s limitations however, is that it only operates at very high granularity of bandwidth so smaller streams of traffic more appropriate to the needs of individuals and enterprises cannot be managed through SDH alone. This capability was provided by ATM and is now provided by MPLS.

Would a moment of reflection be beneficial?

The heresy that keeps popping up in my head when I think about IP and all of its progeny protocols, is that the telecommunications industry has spent fifteen years developing a highly complex and inter-dependent set of technical standards that were only needed to effectively replace what was a ’simple’ standard that did its job effectively at a lower layer in the network. Indeed, pre MPLS, many of the global ISPs used ATM to provide deterministic management of the global IP networks.

Has the industry now created a highly over-engineered and over-complex reference architecture? Has a whole new generation of staff been so marinaded for a decade in deep IP knowledge, training and experience that it’s for an individual to question technical strategy? Has the wheel has turned full circle?

In my post Traffic Engineering, capacity planning and MPLS-TE, I wrote about some of the challenges facing the industry and the carriers’ need to undertake fine-grain traffic engineering to ensure that individual service streams are provided with appropriate QoS. As consumers start to use the Internet more and more for real-time isochronous services such as VoIP and video streaming, there is a major architectural concern about how this should be implemented. Do carriers really want to continue to deploy an ever increasing number of protocols that add to the complexity of live networks and hence increase risk?

It is surprising just how many carriers use only very light traffic engineering and simply rely on over-provisioning of bandwidth at a wavelength level. This may be considered to be expensive (but is it if they own the infrastructure?) and architects may worry about how long they will be able to continue to use this straightforward approach, but there does seem to be a real reticence to introduce fine-grained traffic management. I have been told several times that this is because they do not trust some of the new protocols and it would be too risky to implement them. It is industry knowledge that a router’s operating system contains many features that are never enabled and this is as true today as it was in the 90s.

It is clear that management of fine-grain traffic QoS is one of the top issues to be faced in coming years. However, I believe that many carriers have not even adopted the simplest of traffic engineering standards in the form of MPLS-TE that starts to address the issue. Is this because many see that adopting these standards could create a significant risk to their business or is it simply fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD)?

Are these some of the questions carriers we should be asking ourselves?

Has management goals moved on since the creation of early MPLS standards?

When first created, MPLS was clearly focused on providing predictable determinability at layer-3 so that the use of ATM switching could be dropped to reduce costs. This was clearly a very successful strategy as MPLS now dominates the core of public networks. This idea was very much in line with David Isenberg’s ideas articulated in The Rise of the Stupid Network in 1997 which we were all so familiar with at the time. However ambitions have moved on, as they do, and the IP vision was considerably expanded. This new ambition was to create a universal network infrastructure that could provide any service using any protocol that any customer was likely to need or buy. This was called an NGN.

However, is that still a good ambition to have? The focus these days is on aggressive cost reduction and it makes sense to ask whether an NGN approach could ever actually reduce costs compared to what it would replace. For example, there are many carriers today who wish to exclusively focus on delivering layer-2 services. For these carriers, does it make sense to deliver these services across a layer 3 based network? Maybe not.

Are networks so ‘on the edge’ that they have to be managed every second of the day?

PSTN networks that pre-date IP were fundamentally designed to be reliable and resilient and pretty much ran without intervention once up and running. They could be trusted and were predictable in performance unless a major outside event occurred such as a spade cutting a cable.

IP networks, whether they be enterprise or carrier, have always had an well-earned image of instability and going awry if left alone for a few hours. This is much to do with the nature of IP and the challenge of managing unpredicted traffic bursts. Even today, there are numerous times when a global IP network goes down due to an unpredicted event creating knock-on consequences. A workable analogy would be that operating an IP network is similar to a parent having to control an errant child suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder.

Much of this has probably been brought about by the unpredictable nature of routing protocols selecting forwarding paths. These protocols have been enhanced over the years by so many bells and whistles that a carrier’s perception of the best choice of data path across the network will probably be not the same as the one selected by the router itself.

Do operational / planning architecture engineers often just want to “leave things as they are” because it’s working. Better the devil you know?

When a large IP network is running, there is a strong tendency to want to leave things well alone. Is this because there are so many inter-dependent functions in operation at any one time that it’s beyond an individual to understand it? Is it because when things go wrong it takes such an effort to restore service and it’s often impossible to isolate the root cause if it not down to simple hardware failure?

Is risk minimisation actually the biggest deciding factor when deciding what technologies to adopt?

Most operational engineers running a live network want to keep things as simple as possible. They have to because their job and sleep are on the line every day. Achieving this often means resisting the use of untried protocols (such as MPLS-TE) and replacing fine-grained traffic engineering with the much simpler strategy of using over-provisioned networks ( Telcos see it as a no-brainer because they already own the fibre in the ground and it is relatively easy to light an additional dark wavelength).

At the end of the day, minimising commercial risk is right at the top of everyone’s agenda, though it usually sits below operation cost reduction.

Compared to the old TDM networks they replace, are IP-based public networks getting too complex to manage when considering the ever increasing need for fine-grain service management at the edge of the network?

The spider’s web of protocols that need to perform flawlessly in unison to provide a good user experience is undoubtedly getting more and more complex as time goes by. There is only little effort to simply things and there is a view that it is all becoming too over-engineered. Even if a new standard has been ratified and is recommended for use, this does not mean it will be implemented in live networks on a wide scale basis. The protocol that heads the list of under exploited protocols is IPv6 (IPv6 to the rescue – eh?).

There is significant on-going standards development activity in the space of path provisioning automation (Path Computation Element (PCE): IETF’s hidden jewel) and of true multilayer network management. This would include seamless control of layer-3 (IP), layer-2.5 (MPLS) and layer-1 networks (SDH) (GMPLS and common control). The big question is (risking being called a Luddite) would a carrier in the near future risk the deployment of such complexity that could bringing down all layers of a network at once? Would the benefits out weigh the risk?

Are IP-based public networks more costly to run than legacy data networks such as Frame Relay?

This is a question I would really like to get an objective answer to as my current views are mostly based on empirical and anecdotal data. If anyone has access to definitive research, please contact me! I suspect, and I am comfortable with the opinion until proved wrong, that this is the case and could be due to the following factors:

• There needs to be more operations and support staff permanently on duty than with the old TDM voice systems thus leading to higher operational costs.
• Operational staff require a higher level of technical skill and training caused by the complex nature of IP. CCIEs are expensive!
• Equipment is expensive as the market is dominated by only a few suppliers and there are often proprietary aspects of new protocols that will only run on a particular vendor’s equipment thus creating effective supplier lock-in. The router clone market is alive and healthy!

It should be remembered that the most important reason given to justify the convergence on IP was the cost savings resulting from collapsing layers. This has not really taken place except for the absorption of ATM into MPLS. Today, each layer is still planned, managed and monitored by separate systems. The principle goal of a Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture is still to achieve this magic result of reduced costs. Most carriers are still waiting on the fence for evidence of this.

Is there a degradation in QoS using IP networks?

This has always been a thorny question to answer and a ‘Google’ to find the answer does not seem to work. Of course, any answer lies in the eyes of the beholder as there is no clear definition of what the term QoS encompasses. In general, the term can be used at two different levels in relation to a network’s performance: micro-QoS and the macro-QoS.

Micro-QoS is concerned with individual packet issues such as order of reception of packets, number of missing packets, latency, delay and jitter. An excessive amount of any of these will severely degrade a real-time service such as VoIP or video streaming. Macro-QoS is more concerned with network wide issues such as network reliability and resilience and other areas that could affect overall performance and operational efficiency of a network.

My perspective is that on a correctly managed IP / MPLS network (with all the hierarchy and management that requires), micro-QoS degradation is minimal and acceptable and certainly no worse than IP over SDH. Indeed, many carriers deliver traditional private wire services such as E1 or T1 connectivity over an MPLS network using pseudowire tunnelling protocols such as Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS). However this does significantly raise the bar in respect to the level of IP network design and network management quality required.

The important issue is the possible degradation at the macro-QoS level where I am comfortable with the view that using an IP / MPLS network there will always be a statistically higher risk of fault or problems due to its complexity compared to a simpler IP over SDH system. There is a certain irony in that macro-QoS performance of a network could be further degraded when additional protocols are deployed to improve-micro-QoS performance.

Is there still opportunity for simplification?

In an MPLS dominated world, there is still significant opportunity for simplification and cost reduction.

Carrier Ethernet deployment

I have written several posts (Ethernet goes carrier grade with PBT / PBB-TE?) about carrier Ethernet standards and the benefits its adoption might bring to public network. In particular, the promise of simplification. To a great extent this interesting technology is a prime example of where a new (well newish) approach that actually does make quite a lot of sense comes up against the new MPLS-for-everything-and-everywhere dogma. It is not just a question of convincing service providers of the benefit but also overcoming the almost overwhelming pressure brought on carrier management form MPLS vendors who have clear vested interests in what technologies their customers choose to use. This often one-sided debate definitely harks back to the early 90s no-way-IP culture. Religion is back with a vengeance.

Metro networks

Let me quote Light Reading from September 2007. “What once looked like a walkover in the metro network sector has turned into a pitched battle – to the surprise, but not the delight, of those who saw Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) as the clear and obvious choice for metro transport.” MPLS has encountered several road bumps on its way to domination and it should always be appropriate to question whether any particular technology adoption is appropriate.

To quote the column further: “The carrier Ethernet camp contends that MPLS is too complex, too expensive, and too clunky for the metro environment.” Whether ‘thin MPLS’ (PBB-TE / PBT or will it be T-MPLS?) will hold off the innovative PBB intruder remains to be seen. At the end of the day, the technology that provides simplicity and reduced operational costs will win the day.

Think the unthinkable

As discussed above, the original ambition of MPLS has ballooned over the years. Originally solving the challenge of how to provide a deterministic and flexible forwarding methodology for layer-3 IP packets and replace ATM, it has achieved this objective exceptionally well. These days, however, it seems to be always assumed that some combination or mix of Ethernet (PBB-TE) and/or MPLS-TE and maybe even GMPLS is the definitive, but highly complex, answer to creating that optimum highly integrated NGN architecture that can be used to provide any service any customer might require.

Maybe, it is worth considering a complementary approach that is highly focused on removing complexity. There is an interesting new field of innovation that is proposing that path forwarding ‘intelligence’ and path bandwidth management is moved from layer-3, layer.2.5 and layer-2 back into layer-1 where it rightly belongs. By adding additional capability to SDH, it is possible to reduce complexity in the above layers. In particular deployment scenarios this could have a number of major benefits, most of which result in significantly lower costs.

This raises an interesting point to ponder. While revenues still derive from traditional telecom-oriented voice services, the services and applications that are really beginning to dominate and consume most bandwidth are real time interactive and streaming services such as IPTV, TV replays, video shorts, video conferencing, tele-presence, live event broadcasting, tele-medicine, remote monitoring etc. It could be argued that all these point-to-point and broadcast services could be delivered with less cost and complexity using advanced SDH capabilities linked with Ethernet or IP / MPLS access? Is it worth thinking about bringing SDH back to the NGN strategic forefront where it could deliver commercial and technical benefits?

To quote a colleague: “The datacom protocol stack of IP-over-Ethernet was designed for asynchronous file transfer, and Ethernet as a local area network packet-switching protocol, and these traditional datacom protocols do a fine job for those applications (i.e. for services that can tolerate uncertain delays, jitter and throughput, and/or limited-scope campus/LAN environments). IP-over-Ethernet was then assumed to become the basis protocol stack for NGNs in the early 2000s, due to the popularity of that basic datacom protocol stack for delivering the at-that-time prevailing services carried over Internet, which were mainly still file-transfer based non-real-time applications.”

SDH has really moved on since the days when it was only seen as a dumb transport layer. At least one service provider company, Optimum Communications Services offers an innovative vision whereby instead of inter-node paths being static, as is the case with the other NGN technologies discussed in this post, the network is able to dynamically determine the required inter-node bandwidth based on a fast real-time assessment of traffic demands between nodes.

So has the wheel has turned full circle?

As most carriers’ architectural and commercial strategies are wholly focused on IP with the Yellow Brick Road ending with the sun rising over a fully converged NGN, how much real willingness is there to listen to possible alternate or complementary innovative ideas?

In many ways the telecommunications industry could be considered to have returned to the closed shutter mentality that dominated before IP took over in the late 1990s – I hope that this is not the case. There is no doubt that choosing to deploy IP / MPLS was a good decision, but a decision to deploy some of the derivative QoS and TE protocols is far from clear cut.

We need to keep our eyes and minds open as innovation is alive and well and most often arises in small companies who are free to think the the unthinkable. They may might not be always right but they may not be wrong either. Just cast your mind back to the high level of resistance encountered by IP in the 90s and let’s not repeat that mistake again. There is still much scope for innovation within the IP based carrier network world and I would suspect this has everything to do with simplifying networks and not complicating them further.

Addendum #1: Optimum Communications Services – finally a way out of the zero-sum game?

To quote Channel Register:

EDS has bought Reading-based firm Nexagent. Nexagent makes software for companies to design, manage, and provision virtual private networks, especially those for large companies which might include several regions.

EDS said the buy was part of ongoing investments into its networking capabilities. It reckons Nexagent will mean it can get customers onto the EDS network more quickly and cheaply.

Nexagent staff will move to EDS and report to its EMEA HQ in Stockley Park.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

For the press release: EDS hoovers up Reading networking firm

14:41 GMT, Monday, March 3^rd 2008: If I have been a bit quite recently, this is the reason why. With no great drama we are pleased to say that we have gone live with the trymehere service – www.trymehere.com on the Internet!

Like everyone else who has worked on a project for some considerable time we are so pleased that this day has finally arrived! We have been developing trymehere for some considerable time but as we are self-financed we felt this to be acceptable. We still have a never-ending list of ‘nice to have’ features and minor things we could change or add but we decided that it was time to go live.

This is a real beta version and we hope that early users will report any problems they might come across. Indeed, the first person to use the Wizard failed to complete it due to a bug but this was corrected within ten minutes of it being reported.

Of course, now comes the time when we find out whether there is any real interest in the service and whether people actually find it a useful. We do not plan to over-promote the service in the early days. This is so easy to do but we will resist and focus on getting the service reliable.

Time will tell of course, so watch this space!

By the way, if you create a trymehere account, search for me in the database and send me a Connect Request!

Chris Gare

I don’t normally ‘do news’, but as I wrote a long piece about Azea networks earlier this year I thought this pertinent.

Allen, Texas – (November 29, 2007) – Xtera Communications announced today that it has acquired Azea Networks, a privately held company based in the UK and supplier of world-class optical networking solutions.

Azea is uniquely focused on delivering substantial capacity gains to existing undersea repeatered links. The company’s optical networking upgrade solutions allow operators to exploit the full potential of their existing repeatered subsea cable assets.

With the acquisition, Xtera extends its subsea product portfolio from the unrepeatered market to include repeatered subsea applications. Xtera’s unrepeatered product line provides unprecedented reach for new deployments and enables existing unrepeatered links to be upgraded to significantly higher capacities. Azea’s product line provides similar benefit to repeatered upgrades and initial deployments. By upgrading their existing repeatered assets with these solutions, service providers are able to quickly achieve the capacity of a new system at a fraction of the cost of a new deployment. The consolidated company provides global service providers with an end-to-end optical transport solution covering land and sea.

“The acquisition makes sense for reasons that go beyond our complimentary subsea product portfolios. We share the same passion for customer response and support,” said Mike Hynes, who will assume the role of Executive Vice President Sales & Chief Marketing Officer for Xtera’s Optical Networking division.

“Operators of existing subsea networks are experiencing a surge in bandwidth demand. Their ability to quickly respond by upgrading existing submarine cables provides them a time to market and cost advantage over operators that require new deployments. The products of the combined company allow Xtera to address a wider range of subsea solutions which should maintain the momentum the company has generated over the past year,” said Howard Kidorf, Managing Partner of Pioneer Consulting.

This acquisition is part of Xtera’s planned growth as announced earlier this year. “This provides cost-effective growth to one of our core business areas and strengthens our position in the optical networking market,” commented Jon Hopper, CEO of Xtera Communications.

About Xtera Communications

Xtera Communications provides network solutions enabling communications companies to profitably deliver high-bandwidth tailored services at the lowest sustainable cost per bit. Xtera delivers value by combining sound business practice with compelling advantages in capacity, reach, simplicity and service.

http://www.xtera.com/newsandevents/2007_11_29.cfm

Addendum: Azea Networks, upgrading submarine cables.

I haven’t quite decided whether there is a true religious war between the now ubiquitous MPLS and the more recent PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridging Traffic Engineering) Ethernet technologies. It certainly seems that way sometimes! However, everything has its time and place and that applies to network technologies as well.

On one hand, MPLS is now the de rigueur technology for use in the core of the world’s IP-based ‘converged’ networks. MPLS enables IP to be tamed to a degree by providing deterministic (i.e. predictable) routing and QoS. Deterministic routing forces traffic over a predetermined path so that all packets on that path will experience the same delay. This is an absolute necessity for real-time traffic such as Voice-over-IP, video conferencing and IP-TV services. MPLS also enables traffic to be categorised so that real-time services take preference over non-critical traffic such as email at busy times on the network. I’ve covered much of this in previous posts such as The rise and maturity of MPLS.

If your network strategy guys come from the ‘purist’ MPLS camp then it is clear that they will see MPLS being deployed both in the core and metro access network. However, MPLS is often now seen as an expensive and complex technology to maintain in real environments and this has prevented carriers from rolling out MPLS to the edge of their networks, often known as local metro-networks. A carrier usually has only one core network but often has many local access or metro networks which directly connect to their customers’ buildings and private LANs. If MPLS were deployed throughout this infrastructure costs could skyrocket.

A consequence of this is that the industry has been looking for a lower cost alternative as the technology of preference for use in these access networks. As the transport of preference for enterprises is Ethernet it comes as no surprise that there has been tremendous interest in using Ethernet in carriers’ access networks as it could prove to be a lower cost solution than MPLS. It has been conjectured that the deployment of PBB-TE rather than MPLS could save in excess 40% of costs. This will be the subject of a future post.

This vision has driven a tremendous amount of standards activity that has resulted in the PBB-TE standard whereby inappropriate features have been stripped out of Ethernet to create a transport technology that can be used in carrier’s access networks. I’ve previously written about these initiatives in my posts – Ethernet goes carrier grade with PBT / PBB-TE? and PBB-TE / PBT or will it be T-MPLS?.

If the above scenario is to pan out in practice, then carriers must be able to to seamlessly and transparently deploy and manage services across both technologies and this has been a real if not impossible challenge to date. This has much to do with the immaturity of PBB-TE technology and lack of compatibility with MPLS. For example, MPLS uses pseudowire tunnels for the transport of services across a core network, while PBB-TE uses E-LINE which has been defined by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).

Earlier this week I listened to a most interesting webinar from Hammerhead Systems a USA company who have been focusing on this issue and I would like to thank them for allowing me to use some of their graphics in this post.

It was interesting to hear a clearly articulated vision for a future network strategy based on a technology agnostic view. The term ‘technology agnostic’ in this case means a future based on hybrid networks based on a mechanism whereby MPLS and PBB-TE are able to inter-work. Of course, I’m sure many would see this as a first step to an MPLS-free future, however that could be seen as a bit extreme and I’m sure Hammerhead would never articulate this view!

One of the weaknesses of PBB-TE is the lack of a workable control plane so Hammerhead have partnered with Soapstone in this announcement. Interestingly, Soapstone is a division of a company that I used know quite well, Avici.

Avici came to fame with a terabit router in the late 1990s but with the down turn in the market they decided to focus on providing software to support converged Next Generation Networks. They say they “Provide an abstraction layer that decouples service from the network“. The availability of this portable abstraction layer is the one of the key needs to enable seamless inter-operation between MPLS and and PBB-TE.

In the webinar, Dr. Ray Mota, Chief Strategist and President of Consulting Synergy Research Group, presented a view of PBB-TE past and PBB-TE future. As it’s nearing Christmas this reminded me of Dickens’s Christmas Carol, but I digress…

PBB-TE (past) was profiled as being designed as a replacement for traditional point-to-point SONET/SDH trunks supporting enterprise Ethernet services. However, there are some key pieces missing and this was what the webinar was all about.

PBB-TE (future) is about a “Generalized Services Infrastructure” that is independent of MPLS or PBB-TE transport layers. The joint announcement encompassed the following components of this Generalized Services Infrastructure which claimed to be the “first seamless support across PBB-TE metro networks and MPLS cores” running on Hammerhead’s HSX 6000 PBB-TE Service Gateway™.

• Multipoint-to-Multipoint (MP2MP): Hammerhead’s PBB-TE E-LAN
• Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP): Hammerhead’s PBB-TE E-tree
• Multicast and Multipoint applications: PBB-TE E-Tree for IPTV, IP-VPN, Multicast, and Enterprise Managed Services
• Seamless solutions across MPLS/VPLS and PBB-TE: Hammerhead’s Service gateway for inter-working of MP2MP and P2MP PBB-TE solutions with MPLS/VPLS
• Control Plane Provisioning: Support for MP2MP and P2MP PBB-TE solutions through the Soapstone partnership.
• All of these services supported with MultiClass QoS

An example of a service – business multicast – that could be deployed across a mixed infrastructure is shown below.

Hammerhead make extensive use of the IETF’s Virtual Switch Instance (VSI) as a building block to enable a capability to support both pseudowire trunks across MPLS and PBB-TE trunks based on MEF E-LAN. The diagram below shows how a seamless service can be created:

One of the key services that is driving converged NGN networks is IP-TV and the MEF E-Tree specification provides the multicast capability these types of service require. Again, Hammerhead support this stanfdard on PBB-TE and MPLS.

In practice, Hammerhead’s multicast solutions for PBB-TE networks use Soapstone Networks’ Provider Network Controller (PNC) control plane which decouples the control and data planes enabling Hammerhead’s E-LAN and E-Tree services to run without the development of new protocols. Also, Hammerhead’s VPLS and MPLS E-Tree solutions use existing MPLS control protocols.

Roundup

I don’t normally make my technology posts so focused on a particular vendor’s product set but I wanted to make an exception in this case. I certainly would not be able to confirm that what Hammerhead have announced is truly unique, but it does seem to be a first from my limited visibility. I have also been interested in what Soapstone are doing for some time as well. Perhaps this partnership is a marriage in heaven?

We can all do without technology wars. The telecommunications industries, whether they be fixed or mobile, really do need to focus on providing the innovative services that their customers can use. Moreover, they do need realise that moving packets from one location to another is a commodity service that needs to be offered with exceptional reliability, high customer service but also at low cost. To me, commoditisation is a good thing and not to be something to be frightened of and avoid by trying to jump into so-called value added services to avoid the margin crush. The commoditisation of the computer market following the personal computer steamroller can hardly be seen as a bad thing, but it does mean that infrastructure costs have to come down in step with average service selling prices.

MPLS is a high cost marriage partner and carriers should be looking at alternative technologies to see if they can help reduce costs. Unfortunately it is often the case that equipment vendors are not technology agnostic (e.g. PBT could be catastrophic, says Juniper CEO) and that is very much the case with MPLS. Of course, once a technology really starts to take off – as demonstrated by IP – then every vendor jumps on the bandwagon!

Providing a solution that enables carriers to deploy the most appropriate and cost effective technologies in access and core networks AND to be able to provision and manage services seamlessly, seems to me to be a ‘no brainer’ idea which should receive much interest. It is certainly good to be able to identify one company that can help carriers achieve this goal and it will certainly help PBB-TE gain further credibility.

I certainly predict that the majority of incumbent and alternative carriers that need to connect with customer premises will, if they are not today, evaluate the use PBB-TE to ascertain whether the cost reduction promises are real. Hammerhead’s and Soapstone’s solution could provide a key element in that evaluation. If they are truly unique with this announcement, then they won’t be for long as every other vendor will try and catch up!

Content transcoding hits mobiles

Content adaptation and transcoding is high on the agenda of many small mobile content or services companies at the moment and is causing more bad language and angst than anything else I can remember in the industry in recent times. Before I delve into that issue what is content adaptation?

Content translation and the need for it on the Internet is as old as the invention of the browser and is caused by standards, or I should say the interpretation of them. Although HTML, the language of the web page, transformed the nature of the Internet by enabling anyone to publish and access information through the World Wide Web, there were many areas of the specification that left a sufficient degree of fogginess for browser developers to ‘fill in’ with their interpretation of how content should be displayed.

In the early days, most of us engaged with the WWW through the use of the Netscape Navigator browser. Indeed Netscape epitomised all the early enthusiasm for the Internet and their IPO on August 9, 1995 set in play the fabulously exciting ‘bubble’ of the late 1990s. Indeed, The Netscape browser held over a 90% market share in the years post their IPO.

This inherent market monopoly made it very easy for early web page developers to develop content as it only needed to run on one one browser. However that did not make life particularly easy because the Netscape Navigator browser had so many problems in how it arbitrarily interpreted HTML standards. In practice, a browser is only an interpreter after all and, like human interpreters, are prone to misinterpretation when there are gaps in the standards.

Browser market shares. Source Wikipedia

Content Adaptation

Sometimes the drafted HTML displayed in Navigator fine but at other times it didn’t. This led to whole swathes of work-abounds that made the the task of developing interesting content a rather hit and miss affair. A good example of this is the HTML standard that says that the TABLE tag should support a CELLSPACING attribute to define the space between parts of the table. But standards don’t define the default value for that attribute, so unless you explicitly define CELLSPACING when building your page, two browsers may use different amounts of white space in your table.

(Credit: NetMechanic) This type of problem was further complicated by the adoption of browser-specific extensions. The original HTML specifications were rather basic and it was quite easy to envision and implement extensions that enabled better presentation of content. Netscape did this with abandon and even invented a web page scripting language that is universal to day – JavaScript (This has nothing to do with Sun’s Java language).

Early JavaScript was ridden with problems and from my limited experience of writing in the language most of the time was spent trying to iunderstand why code that looked correct according to the rule book failed to work in practice!

Around this time I remember attending a Microsoft presentation in Reston where Bill Gates spent an hour talking about why Microsoft were not in favour of the internet and why they were not going to create a create a browser themselves. Oh how times change when within a year BG announced that the whole company was going to focus on the Internet and that their browser would be given away free to “kill Netscape”.

In fact, I personally lauded Internet Explorer when it hit the market because, in my opinion, it actually worked very well. It was faster than Navigator but more importantly, when you wrote the HTML or JavaScript, the code worked as you expected it to. This made life so much easier. The problem was that you now had to write pages that would run on both browsers or you risked alienating a significant sector of your users. As there still are today, there were many users who blankly refused to change from using Navigator to IE because of their emotional dislike of Microsoft.

From that point on it was downhill for a decade as you had to include browser detection on your web site so that appropriately coded browser-specific and even worse version specific content could be sent to users. Without this, it was just not possible to guarantee that users would be able to see your content. Below is the typical code you had to use:

var browserName=navigator.appName;
if (browserName=="Netscape")
{
 alert("Hi Netscape User!");
}
else
{
 if (browserName=="Microsoft Internet Explorer")
 {
  alert("Hi, Explorer User!");
 }

If we now fast forward to 2007 the world of browsers has changed tremendously but the problem has not gone away. Although it is less common to detect browser types and send browser-specific code considerable problems still exist in making content display in the same way on all browsers. I can say from practical experience that making an HTML page with extensive style sheets display correctly on Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7 is not a particularly easy and definitely frustrating task!

The need to adapt content to a particular browser was the first example of what is now called content adaptation. Another technology in this space is called content transcoding.

Content transcoding

I first came across true content transcoding when I was working with the first real implementation of a Video on Demand service in Hong Kong Telecom in the mid 1990s. This was based based on proprietary technology and myself and a colleague were of the the opinion that it should be based on IP technologies to be future proof. Although we lost that battle we did manage to get Mercury in the UK to base its VoD developments on IP. Mercury went on to sell its consumer assets to NTL so I’m pleased that the two of us managed to get IP as the basis of broadband video services in the UK at the time.

Around this time, Netscape were keen to move Navigator into the consumer market but it was too bloated to be able to run on a set top box so Netscape created a new division called Navio which created a cut down browser for the set top box consumer market. Their main aim however was to create a range of non-PC Internet access platforms.

This was all part of the anti-PC / Microsoft community that then existed (exists?) in Silicon Valley. Navio morphed into Network Computer Inc. owned by Oracle and went on to build another icon of the time – the network computer. NCI changed its name to Liberate when it IPOed in 1999. Sadly, Liberate went into receivership in the early 2000s but lives on today in the form of SeaChange who bought their assets.

Anyway, sorry for the sidetrack, but it was through Navio that I first came across the need to transcode content as a normal web page just looked awful on a TV set. TV Navigator also transcoded HTML seamlessly into MPEG. The main problems on presenting a web page on a TV were:

Fonts: Text that could be read easily on a PC could often not be read on a TV because the font size was too small or the font was too complex. So, fonts were increased in size and simplified.

Images: Another issue was that as the small amount of memory on an STB meant that the browser needed to be cut down in size to run. One way of achieving this was cut out the number of content types that could be supported. For example, instead of the browser being able to display all picture formats e.g. BMP, GIF, JPG etc it would only render JPG pictures. This meant that pictures taken off the web needed to be converted to JPG at the server or head-end before being sent to the STB.

Rendering and resizing: Liberate automatically resized content to fit on the television screen.

Correcting content: For example, horizontal scrolling is not considered a ‘TV-like’ property, so content was scaled to fit the horizontal screen dimensions. If more space is needed, vertical scrolling is enabled to allow the viewer to navigate the page. The transcoder would also automatically wrap text that extends outside a given frame’s area. In the case of tables, the transcoder would ignore widths specified in HTML if the cell or the table is too wide to fit within the screen dimensions.

In practice, most VoD or IPTV services only offered closed wall garden services at the time so most of the content was specifically developed for an operators VoD service.

WAP and the ‘Mobile Internet ‘comes along

Content adaptation and transcoding trundled along quite happily in the background as a requirement for displaying content on non-PC platforms for many years until 2007 and the belated advent of open internet access on mobile or cell phones.

In the late 1990s the world was agog with the Internet which was accessed using personal computers via LANs or dial-up modems. There was clearly an opportunity to bring the ‘Internet’ to the mobile or cell phone. I have put quotation marks around the Internet as the mobile industry has never seen the Internet in the same light as PC users.

The WAP initiative was aimed at achieving this goal and at least it can be credited with a concept that lives on to this day - Mobile Internet (WAP, GPRS, HSDPA on the move!). Data facilities on mobile phones were really quite crude at the time. Displays were monochrome with a very limited resolution. Moreover, the data rates that were achievable at the time over the air were really very low so this necessitated WAP content standards to take this into account.

WAP was in essence simplified HTML and if a content provider wanted to created a service that could be accessed from a mobile phone then they needed to write it in WAP. Services were very simple as shown in the picture above and could quite easily be navigated using a thumb.

The main point was that is was quite natural for developers to specifically create a web site that could be easily used on a mobile phone. Content adaptation took place in the authoring itself and there was no need for automated transcoding of content. If you accessed a WAP site, it may have been a little slow because of the reliance on GPRS, but services were quite easy and intuitive to use. WAP was extremely basic so it was updated to XHTML which provided improved look and feel features that could be displayed of the quickly improving mobile phones.

In 2007 we are beginning to see phones with full-capability browsers backed up by broadband 3G bearers making Internet access a reality on phones today. Now you may think this is just great, but in practice phones are not PCs by a long chalk. Specifically, we are back to browsers interpreting pages differently and more importantly, the screen sizes on mobile phones are too small to display standard web pages that allow a user to navigate it with ease (Things are changing quite rapidly with Apple’s iPhone technology).

Today, as in the early days of WAP, most companies who seriously offer mobile phone content will create a site specifically developed for mobile phone users. Often these sites will have URLs such as m.xxxx.com or xxxx.mobi so that a user can tell that the site is intended for use on a mobile phone.

Although there was a lot of frustration about phones’ capabilities everything at the mobile phone party was generally OK.

Mobile phone operators have been under a lot of criticism for as long as anyone can remember about their lack of understanding of the Internet and focusing on providing closed wall-garden services, but that seems to be changing at long last. They have recognised that their phones are now capable of being a reasonable platform to access to the WWW. They have also opened their eyes and realised that there is real revenue to be derived from allowing their users to access the web – albeit in a controlled manner.

When they opened their browsers to the WWW, they realised what this was not without its challenges. In particular, there are so few web sites that have developed sites that could be browsed on a mobile phone. Even more challenging is that the mobile phone content industry can be called embryonic at best with few service providers that are well known. Customers naturally wanted to use the web services and visit the web sites that they use on their PCs. Of course, most of these look dreadful on a mobile phone and cannot be used in practice. Although many of the bigger companies are now beginning to adapt their sites to the mobile, Google and MySpace to name but two, 99.9999% (as many 9s as you wish) of sites are designed for a PC only.

This has made mobile phone operators turn to using content transcoding to keep their users using their data services and hence keep their revenues growing. The transcoder is placed in the network and intercepts users’ traffic. If a web page needs to be modified so that it will display ‘correctly’ on a particular mobile phone, the transcoder will automatically change the web page’s content to a layout that it thinks will display correctly. Two of the largest transcoding companies in this space are Openwave and Novarra.

This issue came to the fore recently (September 2007) in a post by Luca Passani on learning that Vodafone had implemented content transcoding by intercepting and modifying the User Agent dialogue that takes place between mobile phone browsers and web sites. From Luca’s page, this dialogue is along the lines of:

• I am a Nokia 6288,
• I can run Java apps MIDP2-CDLC 1,
• I support MP3 ringtones
• …and so on

His concern, quite rightly, is that this is an standard dialogue that goes on across the whole of the WWW that enables a web site to adapt and provide appropriate content to the device requesting it. Without it, they are unable to ensure that their users will get a consistent experience no matter what phone they are using. Incidentally, Luca, provides an open-source XML file called WURFL that contains the capability profile of most mobile phones. This is used by content providers, following a user agent dialogue, to ensure that the content they sent to a phone will run – it contains the core information needed to enable content adaptation.

It is conjectured that, if every mobile operator in the world uses transcoders – and it looks like this is going to be the case – then this will add another layer of confusion to already high challenge of providing content to mobile phones. Not only will content providers have to understand the capabilities of each phone but they will need to understand when and how each operator uses transcoding.

Personally I am against transcoding in this market and reason why can be seen in this excellent posting by Nigel Choi and Luca Passani. In most cases, no automatic transcoding of a standard WWW web page can be better than providing a dedicated page written specifically for a mobile phone. Yes, there is a benefit for mobile operators in that no matter what page a user selects, something will always be displayed. But will that page be usable?

Of course, transcoders should pass through untouched and web site that is tagged by the m.xxxx or the xxxx.mobi URL as that site should be capable of working on any mobile phone, but in these early days of transcoding implementation this is not always happening it seems.

Moreover, the mobile operators say that this situation can be avoided by the 3rd party content providers applying to be on the operators’ white list of approved services. If this turns out to be a universal practice then content providers would need to gain approval and get on all the lists of mobile operators in the world – wow! Imagine an equivalent situation on the PC if content providers needed to get approval from all ISPs. Well, you can’t can you?

This move represents another aspect of how the control culture of the mobile phone industry comes to the fore in placing their needs before those of 3rd party content providers. This can only damage the 3rd party mobile content and service industry and further hold back the coming of an effective mobile internet. A sad day indeed. Surely, it would be better to play a long game and encourage web sites to create mobile versions of their services?

There are myriad of hindrances to any small company wanting to offer service or content on mobile or cell phones. These include the real challenge of how to develop applications that run on multiple phones (Mobile apps: Java just doesn’t cut the mustard?), the challenge of getting appropriate bandwidth and low latency in the data connection that would make using a mobile business or entertainment service a pleasure to use (WAP, GPRS, HSDPA on the move!) and the arcane menu structure on most phones.The new iPod and iPhone bring a real breath of fresh air to this becalmed area of user interface development.

One of the other big hindrances is payment mechanisms.

Current methods can hardly be said to be easy to implement or available in every country. One of the principle mechanisms is to send a Premium SMS (often known as a Reverse Billed SMS) to a customer’s mobile or cell phone. The problem is that not all operators around the world support this mechanism so for any company wanting to offer a mobile web service to anyone around the world, as is the want for an Internet service, this approach provides only limited usability.

There are quite a few companies that focus on simplifying the task of managing this patchwork service. Two that come to mind are Bango and MXtelecom. PSMS paying is also quite error prone and I have seen reports quoting error rates as high as 30%!

It has always seemed rather strange to me that SMS based billing is used for mobile Internet billing as it looked like a desperate clinging-to-straws tactic because there was no other way of doing it. We should remember that no mobile operator foresaw the success of SMS and it looks like the industry also failed to see the need for a simple to use mechanism for 3rd party service provider billing. SMS should be used for communication and not as an awkward-to-use and only-available-in-some-countries mechanism for mobile content payment. How can a small company really rely solely on this approach when it represents their sole mechanism for obtaining worldwide revenue?

None SMS billing is called WAP billing in the industry, but this approach is also rather confused as each operator / country takes a different view. In some countries there is a clearly accepted role for 3rd party merchants who manage transactions by consumers and pass revenue onto the service provider after deducting their margin and maybe the mobile operator’s margin. In other countries consumers are passed on to the particular operator’s portal for payment.

For an Internet company who need to offer service on a mobile phone there is an ‘easy’ way around this issue and that is to create a subscription based model where monthly or annual fees are prepaid via an internet payment page using PayPal or WorldPay. This can be used to buy ‘credits’. Pre-paid credits are then spent on the mobile until they run out. This approach is particularly appropriate for buying content such as ring tones or videos on a mobile phone. Again, this is often a workaround solution because the global mobile operator community has failed to come up with a ubiquitous easy to use solution.

The UK is as challenging a country as any other in regard to mobile payments although it has always been in the vanguard of providing solutions. Indeed, one of the mostly widely read of my posts was of a payment merchant services company going into receivership earlier this year (Velocity Pay in receivership). So it is good to hear that at long last the industry has launched a solution that works – Payforit announced earlier this year. According to the BBC – Mobiles to become digital payment wallets

Payforit is a cross-network mobile payment scheme. It is also called ‘trusted’ (but this needs to be demonstrated rather than claimed up front) because it has been set up as a collective initiative by all of the UK’s largest mobile operators – Vodafone, Orange, 3, O₂ and T-Mobile.

What I really like about the offering is that it the consumer experience is as simple as it can be:

• Select the product, content or service
• Transfer t to the Payforit page and select Pay now
• Download content if appropriate
• The transaction will placed on your mobile phone bill

You can see a customer experience demo here and download the scheme rules

From a mobile industry perspective the following claims are being made for the initiative:

• Payforit will accelerate consumer confidence in mobile payment
• Payforit will increase your retail opportunities, and
• Payforit improves the billing success rate s of mobile services

The promise is that all transactions are recorded and auditable and backed up by details logs that cover two years of transactions and there should be no need for 3rd parties to allocate resources to chase payments.

If Payforit achieves these goals then it will be really good for the industry and, with the brands that lie behind it, there is no reason it shouldn’t. However, as a service provider you need to work through on of the Accredited Payment Intermediaries such as Tanya 2ergo, Netsize, Bango, Tanla or WIN and they will take a margin in addition to mobile operators.

To my mind however there are two flies in the ointment which have much more to do with the nature, culture and attitudes of the global mobile phone operator industry:

1. My main interest as an technologist and an entrepreneur is the Internet world. One of real breakthroughs with that world is that any individual anywhere in the world is able to offer a service to any individual anywhere in the world – and get payment – with ease. In Web 2.0 speak, the ‘long tail’ or millions of individuals can be targeted directly significantly reducing start-up risk and maximising the opportunity for early revenue.There is much talk these days in the mobile world of Mobile Internet and of how a mobile or cell phone is the natural inheritor of the Internet platform over and above the personal computer (That Book! Mobile Web 2.0!). Unless the global mobile industry get their billing act together to make the billing of an individual user – anywhere in the world – of a mobile service as simple as on the Internet, then 3rd party service or content providers will continue to be held back from achieving significant success.

2. I have also read in some of the promotional material for payforit: “The final advantage is revenue share. WAP billing isn’t on an i-mode level yet but 80% of merchant revenue share starts to be acceptable for the industry…”

   I wouldn’t say revenue sharing is an advantage! For a small company focused on delivering their service or application on a mobile phone, accepting that maybe 20% of their revenue going out of the door as a margin to an accredited payment intermediary and mobile operator does not look to be a first step on the path to success. A possible combined margin of 20% looks rapacious to me compared to settlement costs on the Internet. I hope it turns out to be less than that!

Payforit is a big step forward for the UK mobile industry. If the global industry bodies would push similar initiatives around the world that could be accessed through a single global gateway and at sub 5% charges, the industry could really stand up and be proud. We could then really foresee the day that Mobile Internet would really equal the Internet in enabled revenue terms.