ABSTRACT
This paper presents a network solution for radically improved efficiency and manageability of existing network infrastructures while solving the QoS bottleneck for handling mission-critical IP data and video. Customers benefit from reduced cost in both CAPEX and OPEX through higher network utilization and superior manageability. This is obtained by combining the best in cost-efficient Ethernet data access and the latest advances in optical transport technologies.
There is currently a strong market opportunity to explore the increasing demand for triple play services (voice, Internet, broadcast video, VoD, NVoD, etc.) over xDSL. Additionally, CATV operators are digitalizing their networks and upgrading to HDTV while offering data and telephony services to subscribers. The IPTV Bandwidth Study from Bell Labs Research (March 2006) reports that the service mix in the network is changing dramatically. Thanks to the rapid growth of video services, overall traffic bandwidth is expected to increase by 10X from 2005 to 2009, and by 2009 more than 90% of the traffic will be video. Content providers, such as UPC and Time Warner, are using fiber networks instead of satellites for content distribution.
Furthermore, the professional media industry, represented by broadcasters, production houses, content owners and film companies, spending nearly US$8 Billion yearly on satellite transmission services, is starting to use optical networks and Internet services for their B2B transport needs, e.g., to connect studios or production facilities and even arenas for sports events. Clearly, real-time video will be a major part of the content in our future networks.
However, the convergence between the media community and the telecommunications industry has been held back by the lack of adequate network solutions to meet the requirements on quality of service, flexibility and reliability in a cost-efficient way. It is a common belief that over provisioning can solve the problem with QoS in today's packet-switched networks. However, according to Datamonitor, over provisioning is one of the biggest dangers in the RoI model to new services since it drives up CAPEX both on equipment and the underlying infrastructure.
In this paper, we will show how Net Insight's network solution, making use of an advanced automated control plane and new dynamic Optical Transport Network technologies, can radically change the economics of offering video and triple-play services over existing public networks, in terms of both OPEX and CAPEX,. With an automated control plan that can be integrated with GMPLS, you can get a unified view and control plane for your entire network spanning from the packet layer, over bandwidth channels, wavelengths and the actual fibers. Bandwidth channelization and strict service separation is used to guarantee quality of service even with a maintained high utilization (>95%) of the network.
Background
In today's competitive market place, operators are faced with decreasing revenues from traditional telephony services combined with a flat rate price model for Internet services. There are three ways for the operators to maintain and grow profits:
- Increase the customer base
- Reduce the costs of operations
- Find new attractive services that bring in new revenue streams.
Figure 1. Operators' situation
To grow top line revenue and thereby increase the value of the company, telecom operators need to look at new services. The promise of triple play and the introduction of media services have been held back by costly network and access solutions. Recently, there have been large price reductions on servers and access equipment, but current network solutions are not adapted to handle a large amount of real-time critical data and video traffic. Net Insight combines efficient Ethernet access and next generation transport technologies to target this fast-growing market of media and IPTV networks. In contrast to other vendors trying to adapt their old platforms to also handle video and mission-critical data, Net Insight has designed its product platform to handle these new market requirements as well as the old ones. With Net Insight's network solution and new access and server equipment, the business case for triple play services is very compelling and offers attractive pricing to the end customers for bundled services.
Figure 2. Video " The next level of convergence
Support and maintenance are major costs for the telecom operators, often far exceeding the capital investments. Using an automated control plane, such as the new GMPLS standard, with neighbor discovery, automated recovery, simple QoS management and signaled end-to-end provisioning, can significantly reduce the OPEX for the operators, as will be shown later in the paper.
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