* Reader responses regarding carrier-based IPV
Many thanks to the readers who replied to our newsletter last week about IP Video (IPV) offered as a managed service within a carrier’s IP-VPN portfolio. Today, we’ll look at one reader’s observations on some thorny issues about carrier-based IPV, and a Hong Kong provider we heard from that has recently introduced a managed IPV.
Our first response came from a reader who has experience as an engineering manager at four top-tier infrastructure suppliers.
He suggests that “addressing video-session in the traffic mix today…does not have to be based on carrier’s viewpoints on their ROIs etc” because he believes that the issues around “end-to-end security, content aware priority switching…and bandwidth enhancement through header compression” can be resolved based on progress made to date in the enterprise. Rather, he suggests that “the real end-user issues…may be undisputable billing, CoS and QoS granularities.”
Our observation: Our reader has a very valid point on both cases for what is already being solved and for what may stand in the way of a managed service. In our experience, carrier billing systems support alone can add months (or years) to rolling out the advanced services—the network is (in our opinion) always “the easy part.” And typically, a carrier is faced with a more complex network of devices that affect CoS and QoS than is typically found in an enterprise network because the carrier will need to manage so many different kinds of devices found at the customer premise.
Of course, the easy way out is for the carrier to offer a flat rate bill for each connection and only offer the service with a one or two vendor, turnkey solution that includes every device that can affect QoS. But the easy way out might not prove to be very marketable for the mass market.
Our second reply came from Micty Wong, Senior Vice President for Marketing at CPCNet; CPCNet is a leading MPLS VPN service provider in Hong Kong focused on the Asian Market. In January 2009, CPC launched managed video conferencing, which marries H.264/SVC with the company’s MPLS VPN networking services. The services, branded “VC2 “[VC-squared] are designed to offer a high quality point-to-point managed IPV with steady and acceptable video quality when compared with other “bandwidth and cost hungry” solutions, according to Wong.
Wong continued to say that the solution architecture uses “Scalable Video Coding,” enabling “applications to dynamically adapt to varying network conditions such as packet loss, fluctuating network bandwidth, and network delay. Accordingly, this approach has the potential to remove the barrier to large-scale adoption of video…[delivering] an optimal experience across endpoints of different resolutions,” The architecture is based on routing encoded packets to deliver rate-matching while adapting to bandwidth fluctuations.
Next time we’ll hear some details from Masergy, a service provider who offers a managed, on-demand global IPV service over Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs.
