Service Provider Networks / (none) / Bleeding Edge:

Bringing Home the Gold with Route Control

By Daniel Briere and Beth Gage
The Edge, 03/04/02

Once again we are on the heels of that time when the world's best have gathered along the rinks, slopes, and half-pipes to compete for the gold. Talk around the water cooler has been laced with jargon like Lutz, Axel and Salchow. Meanwhile, in a growing number of telecom circles, terms such as BGP, multihoming and route control are being bantered about, indicating the interest route control is gaining in the market and from service providers specifically.

Much like the women's bobsled, route control has entered as a new event for service providers. Service providers can offer route control solutions to customers similar to managed CPE services by bundling route control hardware and software with each customer solution. The benefit to the customer is that, unlike pairs figure skating, a route control solution judges performance in an unbiased manner-the appropriate route across the service provider's network (or many provider networks) is automatically selected based on performance and cost parameters determined by the enterprise.

Some service providers are seizing this golden opportunity by bringing route control to their customers (and stakeholders). By incorporating route control technology in their networks, they may offer premium routed network services. Route control-focused service providers such as Opnix and Sockeye Networks offer a route control service, optimizing an enterprise's multihomed Internet access. These services can be leveraged by service providers as well, and resold to their customers as a means of differentiation.

IDCs Inflow and Equinix now offer intelligent routing services to complement their hosting offers. Inflow delivers a service through its in-house developed monitoring and assessment technology, and Equinix offers a managed service using a premises-based solution. Focal Communications and Deru Internet have integrated route control solutions into their networks. Other service providers are also considering the managed service route, employing products from vendors such as netVmg, Proficient Networks or RouteScience. This space could soon become as crowded as the relay in short-track skating.

This technology stands to have substantial impacts on the service provider community from an IP services adoption perspective. As Internet performance improves due to route control (and links are protected with a security solution), enterprises and consumers will gain even more confidence in using the Internet as a means of conducting business. Enterprises will certainly not abandon their legacy networks, but their adoption of and, in some cases, migration to IP could accelerate-most likely for new sites on the network or for new applications.

But route control adoption could be somewhat slow to begin because many enterprises may not know they have a problem. Relying on information from notable third parties, they read that rates are acceptable and that Internet traffic flow is actually improving. A recent report by NetForecast indicates this is not quite the case, particularly for dial-up users whose downloads average 20+ seconds per page. Even if they are aware of the problem, some enterprises assume it is endemic to the Internet and they can't fix the Internet. Instead, they multihome with an increasing number of links to gain improved performance (avoiding congestion of peering points), but this is costly and inefficient. Like a luge that starts slowly and then accelerates to high speeds, demand for route control will do so when these enterprises realize it can help them reduce unnecessary links by leveraging the diversity of networks to find the best path.

On the surface, some service providers might see this as a bad thing-less bandwidth provisioned means smaller revenue. But many enterprises will continue to multihome for improved performance and redundancy. They will be armed with more information to help make economic decisions on how many networks they need to multihome, and this number will vary from organization-to-organization. Regardless, they will select service providers with a solid offering, like those enhanced by route control.

Route control can also affect service providers in network design and operations. Shifts in IP traffic due to optimized routing can influence where and when service providers increase network capacity and add equipment to their networks. They now can offer end-to-end performance adjustments that do not require manual updating.

Who knows? By the time the next Olympics roll around, route control may be as popular as ice hockey.