Listening to Siroos Afshar talk this morning makes me think of yesterday’s talk by Tony Bates. I took some notes at that time, which I’ll include below. While much more broadly focused than Siroos, Tony also promotes intelligence in the network — makes sense given much of Cisco’s revenue comes from the likes of AT&T.
When pressed by Brad Templeton during Q&A, about the focus on intelligence into the network, Tony agrees the more distributed you are, the better you can scale. But then he goes on to discuss his personal experiences at MCI(?) where it appears he needed MPLS to manage his IP core network. [Note to self: should write a post on using MPLS to manage IP networks, why it’s needed and how it differs from DiffServ or IMS approaches to QoS. ]
Notes on Tony Bates’s talk at Spring VON
Projects household requirements by 2010 — 1x HDTV + 1x SDTV + 2x PVRs + 1x VoIP phone + 1 HS Data (20–50 Mbps)
Assumes switched video (unicast) not broadcast…, assumes triple-play drives ARPU and thus drives investment (some cable companies are getting $200+ per month because of additional services PPV etc.), expects most people’s usage to still be asymmetric…
Tony’s view of the evolution of TV (beyond analog broadcast): 1. 800 channels and nothing on. 2. DVDs let you get what you want at better quality. 3) HD & DVRs fix quality and convenience. 4. Internet-based delivery (more of what I want when I want it; UGC; users sync there watching experiences so they can IM about it)
Path to NGN is clear, driven by HDTV and IPTV — affects complete architecture.
1 Mbps to 10GE access in 2010 time frame. Wants IT class services for managing child access. Wants differential services.
Contrasts Google with AT&T, BT, NTT but claims they have the same issues.
- ARPU ($ per search)
- Capex per user
- Cost of user acquisition
- Opex per user
- % churn
Note, he doesn’t mention the dramatically lower costs that Google has for acquisition and for opex per user…
Service providers should charge for QoS and compete on performance. After all, Google positions advertisers on the search page (sponsored links and their position) and competes on performance.
For Internet access, QoS is needed to provide high bandwidth, high priority access to 20–30 apps including advanced security and policy.
Implies we need service enablement (service control) going well beyond IMS — need Identity, Policy & Billing in the service layer and an intelligent edge with a multiservice core in the network layer. Calls this the IP NGN Architecture which starts with policy management and security management. DPI, SBC, NAT, Security, Video acceleration, subscriber management… Claims this is required to delver consumer services…
Pushes network convergence on IP-MPLS over Ethernet; with QoS everywhere, virtualization, …
Also comments about many different edges. CableCo’s view set top boxes as part of their network.
Hi Brough,
It was MCI that Tony worked at, but it was some time ago, over 11 years, and MPLS was not in use then. I think they may have used ATM for traffic engineering at that time.
Look forward to your note to yourself, as a quick summary, diffserv is a way of prioritizing traffic, whereas MPLS is a way of creating tunnels which can steer different traffic along different paths according to rules, and to which logical bandwidth assignments can be made and supported by scheduling policies. MPLS also provides a fast failover mechanism and has become a technology upon which VPN constructs have been built as well.
Posted by: mark seery | March 21, 2007 at 09:54 PM