Co-sponsored feature: AT&T
There’s a new world of complex, converged content and applications out there, and everyone’s
involved. Underpinning it all, and meeting the vast rise in web traffic, are IP networks with huge
capacity. But the game’s not just about headline bandwidth. Reliability, quality of service and security
are all vital factors service providers need to consider when choosing a wholesale IP carrier.
Way beyond bandwidth, the
new wholesale IP proposition
Photo: Redchopsticks, Getty Images
devices that enable users to access much of the functionality of their PCs while on the move, and a raft of
previously unavailable applications and features.
Such demands for broadband connectivity experiences have led analyst firm Yankee Group to predict
that a $1 trillion market for such connectivity will
emerge in the next five years.
According to Yankee Group, consumers that are
able to connect to personalised, interactive content,
communities and commerce at any time from any
location will be among the most significant trends of
the next decade.
To date there are already 3.9 billion network connections worldwide, and Yankee Group sees that
growing by a further 21% by 2012. Seamless access,
consistent usability and simpler pricing are all key
requirements to enable providers to participate in
this growth.
The Web 2.0 revolution has seen a cosmic increase
in web traffic and, as social networking applications
such as Twitter and Facebook entrench themselves
ever further into users’ daily routines, that traffic can
only be set to grow still further.
Domestic broadband users’ habits are also changing
as new applications, for example video, via sites such
as YouTube, as well as home-produced films, wing
their way across the web in increasing volumes.
Offerings such as AT&T U-verse, a suite of internet protocol-based products and services that utilise
both fibre-to-the-node and fibre-to-the-premises
technologies to obtain speeds up to 18 megabits a
second to the user’s location, are illustrative of the
need for speed users are demanding.
AT&T U-Verse also reflects users’ increasing
expectations for new features — such as a DVR that
can record up to four shows at a time and is programmable from any web-connected computer or wireless
device — all features of the service.
Huge email attachments are now the standard and,
in the enterprise world, there’s a greater acceptance of
working from home using bandwidth-hungry collaborative tools and applications. Fuller-featured mobile
phones, like BlackBerry devices and rivals such as the
iPhone, have raised the bar on business users’ expectations and also driven surges in web traffic.
The changing behaviour of end users is bringing substantial volumes of new traffic, from both wireline and
wireless endpoints, to the IP backbone. The mobile
world is placing tremendous demands on the backhaul
network, thanks to greater access to bandwidth, new
44 Global Telecoms Business CEO and CFO Guide to Wholesale: January/February 2009
Robust reliability
The internet, originally designed as a “best effort”
network, will be under increasing pressure as it handles this additional traffic and service providers will
need to select a reliable, security conscious, qualityfocused IP carrier.
At the heart of reliability lies redundancy. Only
with scale of network can IP carriers be able
to cope with spikes in demand and provide the
redundancy users need to make certain that their
connection remains reliable. Few have the sheer
muscle to do this.
However, capacity alone is only part of the answer.
IP carriers that handle petabytes of data traffic on a
daily basis must have the ability to seamlessly integrate networks and operations across geographies.
Coverage is a base level requirement and, as organisations rely even more heavily on IP connections to
support their business applications, carriers must rise
to the challenge of providing reliability and continuity in the face of increased potential for disruption.
As more and more businesses start to run more of
their operations from within the internet cloud and
models such as software as a service or SaaS find
wider audiences, the challenge is increased and the
risks are heightened.
Service providers need to select a wholesale IP carrier that can provide them not only with bandwidth,
but also the high level skills necessary to support
the applications their customers run in a securityconscious and reliable way.
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Co-sponsored feature: AT&T
Photo: Bernhard Lang, Getty Images
pendence and enables a decoupling of the device from
the service itself.
Secure communications
Emphasis on quality
Quality of service or QoS is critical in this new
services environment. The consequences of failure
are much more sharply defined. A crackle on a VoIP
call, although undesirable, is not disastrous. But a
failure of streamed content, or a slow connection to
a collaborative working environment, could be a total
disaster with negative commercial consequences.
As new services converge in the IP layer for delivery,
network-centric QoS capabilities become the means
by which service designers can fine tune IP network
performance for specific traffic flows in terms of loss,
delay, jitter, admission priority or routing.
In this way, QoS mechanisms can be used to
improve performance for high priority applications
during times of network congestion. In a corporate
network, for example, a CEO’s videoconference to
department heads could be prioritised over a sales
manager doing some research work on the web.
IP carriers, such as AT&T Wholesale, have also
identified means to deliver specific types of service.
This is a critical requirement of a wholesale IP carrier, since service assurance encompasses monitoring,
managing and maintaining the network in order that
levels of service, performance and availability to support services can be met, and that customer expectations and service level agreements may be reached.
AT&T’s CARTS (Common Architecture for RealTime services over IP) proposition also includes
end-to-end integrated video capabilities or IVC, for
example. The IVC architecture provides a model of
how video services such as mobile video or IPTV
can be provided along with converged services across
video and other applications such as telephony.
Reliability is provided since such convergence is
built into AT&T’s architecture, through common
enablers and service blending, rather than depending
on pair-wise interworking between services as has
been standard in the past.
The IVC architecture effectively virtualises videocapable devices to encourage service and device inde-
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As web traffic surges, so commensurately does the
propensity for breaches of security to occur, whether
as a consequence of malware, or benign but equally
damaging failings. IP carriers must have the objective
of protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of customers’ communications.
AT&T is committed to the basic security principles of
defence in depth, which encompasses multiple mechanisms such as prevention, management, logging and
auditing and continual improvement and innovation.
Those may seem obvious points to provide protection, but applications that use session initiation protocol (SIP) such as VoIP pose specific security challenges due to the protocol design itself. With VoIP,
for example, both the signalling as well as the actual
voice messages are carried in-band, which makes
signalling as vulnerable to the same security risks as
other internet traffic.
The CARTS security architecture also addresses
the need to safeguard customer data, which is becoming an increasingly costly problem for businesses.
Service architecture should be designed to safeguard
customer data, voice services, multimedia services and
applications from internal and external threats such as
denial-of-service attacks.
However, there is always a balance to strike between
ultimate security and the cost and manageability of
security systems.
AT&T’s IP network security is designed to supply
and confirm proper availability, confidentiality and
integrity of user information while providing solutions that are flexible and do not impose requirements
that may be uneconomical or too constraining from
an operational point-of-view.
The stakes are also higher for service providers in
this new arena where customer’s communications,
such as video content or other media that carry their
own intrinsic value, are delivered.
The application of digital rights management,
which encrypts content for IP transport and licensing, can protect the intellectual property involved.
AT&T’s DRM approach includes real-time and
off-line encryption, key and licensing information
management, in addition to the use of secure servers
for such transactions.
The acceleration of web traffic is unlikely to slow
even in these economically negative times, and service providers seeking an IP carrier will need to select
those with not only the scale, scope and reliability in
network terms, but also the skill required to manage
and optimise their networks.
In these tough times, maintaining and growing that
expertise will require sustained investment and few
providers are in a position to make that committed
ongoing and also necessary investment.
AT&T has extraordinary financial strength, having
reported revenues of $124 billion last year and, with
connections to more than 600 carriers in more than
220 countries, has both the network and organisational
muscle to support the inevitable and welcome expansion
of web traffic in today’s testing business climate. n
Global Telecoms Business CEO and CFO Guide to Wholesale: January/February 2009 45