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NewsGlobe: Commentary
Commentary
Keeping tabs on the network
Network visibility helps maintain customer happiness
by Sean Buckley
Being proactive about resolving network issues before the user knows
there’s a problem has never been a traditional service provider or a cable
operator’s strong suit.
To be fair, incumbent phone companies and cable operators often can’t
be proactive because they can’t see everything traversing the network.
At the same time, a growing gaggle of applications are leveraging the
service provider’s broadband pipe to deliver services they neither
created nor make money off.
What’s more, these Internet services create issues for not only service
providers, but often business customers.
Michael Phelan, president, CEO, and member of the board of directors of
SevOne, an emerging application and network performance monitoring
appliance vendor, told me how network slowdowns in the order entry
department of one of its Fortune 250 enterprise customers prevented
the order processing department from operating effectively.
“The director of order processing put in a call to IT [saying] ‘all my guys
are sitting on their hands because your network is working so slowly
right now and we can’t process any orders’,” recalled Phelan about this
customer. “What the [IT guy at this Fortune 250 company] reported
upon installing the SevOne system that the problem was that all of the
guys from order processing were logged into YouTube watching movies.”
Video goes over the top
Even though I am not advocating people watch TV at work, the Internet
continues to expand into new territories and service providers must
respond.
Once relegated to the cable box and the traditional broadcast medium
that dictated when and what you could watch, Internet-based or — the
industry’s latest buzz word — over-the-top video services, are expanding
the ways consumers get their content.
Whether you’re watching the latest episode of “Lost” or an old episode
of “Faulty Towers”, ABI Research believes OTT video is an unstoppable
and inevitable force. In its new study, “Over-the-Top Internet Video
Strategies for Carriers,” the research firm forecasts that more than 1
billion users will view online video by 2013.
An easy proposition for service providers would be to unplug anyone
using this service, but ABI Research Senior Analyst Cesar Bachelet writes
that service providers, especially those offering and owning their
broadband networks, should embrace this new trend as an opportunity
vs. a threat.
“They can offer access to content via this increasingly popular
alternative platform,” Bachelet says. “They can offer content beyond
that available through traditional channels, and they can reach a new
set of subscribers.”
Outside the IPTV hype, it’s clear traditional landline operators are finding
utility in providing OTT video services. EMBARQ, for instance, launched
its Online Broadband Video Store that allows only its high-speed DSL
customers to purchase and rent thousands of movies, TV shows and
music videos. (See:
)
More recently, Bell Canada launched its Bell Video Store online video
service that allows consumers to download 1,500 movies and TV shows
for rental. Such an offering would make sense for Bell Canada. The new
offering allows Bell to augment its well-established, satellite-based
Express Vu TV service with the ability to watch new video on a TV, PC
or X-Box device.
Whether or not Internet-based video is embraced by the service
provider, consumers will access this content and expect to get it and
get it with good quality.
DPI to the rescue
So with all this new traffic going over the pipe into homes and
businesses, what can operators do to manage it effectively and ensure
the customer is getting what he paid for?
To ensure the network can support new services, service providers are
turning increasingly to deep packet inspection to help thwart attacks
and allow an operator to be more democratic about how it prioritizes
bandwidth to users. But like everything else in the telecom industry, the
vendor community is coming at the DPI opportunity from divergent
angles.
Looking to expand out of its homeland and into large North American Tier
1 carrier accounts, DPI-centric vendor Procera Networks upped the ante
of its product suite with its PL10000 that offers more than 80Gbps of
throughput among other capabilities. (See:
)
Alternatively, Zeugma — whose Greek-based name I keep struggling to
pronounce — believes its Services Node, a service delivery router should
be housed in a multi-purpose device. In addition to performing DPI, a
service provider can leverage the Services Node’s open application
sandbox to support services developed by either the service provider or
a third-party.
What DPI approach will win out remains to be seen, but service providers
must keep an open mind about delivering those services and have the
visibility to ensure they can support what the customer wants.
Hopefully my IT guys aren’t reading this, but I admit I do spend some
time during coffee breaks poring over old YouTube videos of the late
Terry Kath, whose heavy guitar made the band Chicago actually sound
cool before they turned into a ballad manufacturer in the '80s.
Still, when I go home to watch that episode of "Lost" I missed because I
fell asleep last week, I am going to expect that I can get the video,
download it and watch it without incident.
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