Next-generation transport technologies could lead to cool new IP services
Network equipment providers are focusing on injecting more intelligence into public networks. That is making them more reliable and responsive.
It comes down to this: “If carriers have a simpler, more flexible and more manageable network infrastructure, then enterprises get a better quality of service because it is deliverable,” says Steve Taylor, president of Distributed Networking Associates. “And that goes all the way from the hardware, up through things you would never think of, like billing systems. The entire infrastructure of the carrier is being overhauled and simplified, and that bodes well for the enterprise.”
Debating MPLS vs. PBT
This carrier overhaul is a direct result of the recent focus on IP. That WAN technology is far more unwieldy than older ones, such as or frame relay, which were more point-to-point in nature and easier to manage at the carrier level. “If you don’t know where the traffic is, you can’t guarantee it, and therein lies the problem with IP,” says Thomas Nolle, president of technology assessment firm CIMI. “The adaptive behavior of IP tends to destroy control over just where the traffic is going in the network.”
This uncertainty means carriers have been struggling to provide the requisite and uptime assurances for a range of emerging IP business applications. In a frame relay environment, carriers may have been able to guarantee five-nines of uptime per 24 hours, but they cannot get close to that level for today’s VPNs. Sometimes those service-level agreements (SLA) guarantee five-nines over a month instead of 24 hours. “An IP service just doesn’t have the meticulously orderly behavior that a frame relay service does,” Nolle says.
That’s why the carriers are pursuing more deterministic IP-transport mechanisms, such as Transport Multi-protocol Label Switching (T-MPLS) and the new Provider Backbone Transport (PBT), also called Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE). Both technologies support multiprotocol packet transport and scale globally, key requirements for next-generation networks, experts say.
The question of which technology — T-MPLS or PBT — is better is akin to the Betamax vs. VHS debate, which started almost 30 years ago. Some say T-MPLS wins because of its superior traffic-engineering capabilities; others — most notably Nortel — hold that PBT’s Ethernet-like behavior and lower costs make it the technology of choice (more about the two technologies).
For now, carriers and equipment makers are hedging their bets. BT, for example, has been fairly public in its support for Nortel’s PBT gear, announcing it is purchasing the vendor’s 8600 Metro Ethernet Switch and 1850 Metro Ethernet Services Unit for use in its next-generation 21CN (21st-Century Network) program. However, the carrier also is highly supportive of MPLS as a managed-services-enabler in the WAN.
“We’re looking at PBT, but there’s nothing that we see in there that we cannot deliver through our network today,” says Stefan Van Overtveldt, vice president of IT transformation at BT.
The T-MPLS-or-PBT decision clearly means more to the carriers than their customers. “The argument behind PBT is it gives carriers a lower cost of ownership and management, so in theory, they can pass along that savings to customers. Obviously, there’s an advantage to that, but enterprises can get the same services no matter which technology is used,” says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research.
David Creamer, director of network systems and TV operations at St. Petersburg College in Florida, agrees. “I’m out of the loop on whether they do it with MPLS or they do it with whatever. As long as they give me the service and SLAs I’m looking for, I don’t care,” he says.
Future applications
The commonality between these competing technologies is that they make it easier for carriers to manage their next-generation networks. And with easier management comes the ability to concentrate on supporting higher-level emerging IP services. While converging their voice, data, video and wireless infrastructures, carriers hope to provide enterprise users with the same level of service and quality of experience, no matter where they are located or what device they are using. So, if users are in an office in New York, at home in Vermont or on the road in Madrid, they can access their same applications, with the same security levels and functionality.
“Service providers will be able to personalize and manage individual sessions and applications differently, while at the same time guaranteeing SLAs to the enterprise,” says Arpit Joshipura, a vice president at Redback Networks, which provides multiprotocol routers for several next-generation carrier networks.
He uses the example of an ad hoc videoconference: “A year from now, when these networks migrate, we will be able to videoconference through our PCs with built-in cameras and microphones via a secure IP VPN on the fly. The carriers will give us a secure videoconference with high-definition-equivalent bandwidth on the click of a button. That’s what things are moving toward.”
Another example is BT’s Corporate Fusion offering, available in Europe now and in the United States by year-end. Companies with the service issue each employee a dual-mode cell or VoIP phone that works over regular cell and Wi-Fi networks. Corporate Fusion determines which type of service is available and the least expensive at the time the employee makes a call.
“If you’re home, you make the call over your broadband DSL or cable modem line, and if you’re in the office, you call over the Wi-Fi that’s connected into your PBX that then goes out into the public telephone system,” BT’s Van Overtveldt says. “It’s a much cheaper way of communicating, and it comes with the additional plus of only one contact list, so there’s no need to look up a number on a cell phone and dial it from a regular phone, etc.”
Future carrier networks supposedly also will handle many applications that today are managed at the enterprise level, such as security, single contact and calendar, storage and disaster recovery.
Some services are done best at the carrier level, St. Petersburg’s Creamer says. “We use a managed security service from our ISP for handling [] attacks,” he says. “It’s not real complicated, but . . . if we stop attacks at the carrier’s core, then we’re not dealing with the issue. That fits very well for any enterprise.”
Nemertes’ Johnson agrees that security services play well in carrier networks. “Managed security services for things like DDoS, [viruses and spam] make sense, and another example is storage applications,” she says. “I don’t see any good way you can get very high-speed, very distributed storage without involving the network, so the carriers have a play there, too. I can see enterprises migrating that way.”
Next-generation carrier networks likely also will handle disaster recovery and server virtualization services, Creamer says. “For example, our grant programs are temporary in nature. . . . It’s important to do the work or whatever the grant entails, but you don’t want to hire a bunch of IT people or bring a lot of infrastructure in. In a situation like that, a carrier server-virtualization service that was personalized, secure and could be brought up and taken down quickly would be advantageous.”
Show me
Just because carriers will be able to handle cool new services on their next-generation networks doesn’t mean enterprises will let them.
“Say I buy these managed services, and our students and customers become dependent on them, and they become an important part of my business,” Creamer says. “If I don’t have the infrastructure in place or the staff to support them in-house, then the carriers’ pricing models are bound to change. I’ll be stuck. I’ll have to pay what they charge.”
Experts agree and say that for this new model to work, competition has to be robust. “We’re almost in some ways back to 1984 again, in terms of the number of major players in the carrier space,” Distributed Networking Associates’ Taylor says. “I think we have to be very careful that we make sure, as enterprises, we continue to push for a competitive environment.”
Others say they are concentrating on their own internal infrastructures, making their enterprise networks more intelligent, and taking more of a wait-and-see attitude toward carrier services.
“We’re interested in Cisco’s [Application Oriented Networking] initiative and making our internal switches more intelligent and application aware,” says Tony Bishop, a vice president at Wachovia Bank. “But a number of regulatory and security concerns will have to be addressed before we move more of our [processing control] into the public cloud.”
More public than private
Experts say, however, that as these next-generation carrier networks mature, enterprise networks of the future increasingly will rely on key services provided by the carriers and their public infrastructures.
“It’s really a continuum of what functions are delivered by the carrier network and what functions are delivered at the enterprise — where is that demarcation point?” Taylor says. “We started building private data networks 20 years ago, not because it was absolutely the best idea in the world but because it was the only way you could get the services you needed. The service providers were dragging their feet too much.
“Now, with these next-gen networks, the service providers should be able to lead the way,” he says. “The opportunity is theirs to lose.”
Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@comcast.net.
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