Channel changer

Internet service providers are in a revenue bind. Transporting data consumes almost half their bandwidth but generates less than 12% of revenues, according to research from CIMI Corp. And as more bandwidth becomes available, price competition may cut revenues even more for straight transport of both data and voice.

Abatis Systems, a Canadian start-up founded last year by Newbridge Networks executives, has announced a distributed system architecture designed to let ISP customers order advanced services such as videoconferencing or e-commerce applications as easily as they place a telephone call.

"We want to make [Internet protocol] 'consumable' on a pay-as-you-go basis," said John Seminerio, Abatis' president. "Research shows the advanced services market for providers could be as large as $300 billion in the next 10 years. The problem is lowering the cost of implementing them and finding a way to move carriers beyond best-effort services and let them offer guarantees based on the kind of services offered."

The Abatis platform consists of three components. The Enterprise Service Point is a bandwidth manager, virtual private network provisioner and traffic aggregator located at the customer premises but owned and operated by the service provider. The first version, the ESP 6000, debuted at Supercomm with an eight-queue policy-management access system for provisioning a range of services.

"We look at the ESP 6000 as a cable set-top box sitting at the customer premises-we now have the capability of delivering service 'channels' to the enterprise customer," Seminerio said.

Those channels offer discrete, quantifiable, billable service for varied enterprise applications. Different channels can be provisioned on demand or as ongoing services.

All channels can offer service level agreements (SLAs) that monitor bandwidth, delay, jitter and path, then port those measures to the carrier. Proprietary technology lets the ESP 6000 open IP packets, look at their parameters in real time and assign them to the proper channel. Those packets are then filtered, routed and sent to the output queue.

"In essence, we've invented real-time IP traffic management," said Paul Terry, Abatis' chief technical officer. Doing it at the enhanced serial port (ESP), the demarcation point between LAN and WAN boundary, helps providers break from the bandwidth business model and sell services rather than capacity. "If you test services before they hit the local network, you've lost any notionof a true SLA," he said. "We're offering end-to-end management that goes beyond the box."

"The term 'quality of service' is being kicked around the industry as a relative measure-a 'gold' QOS vs. a 'silver,'" Seminerio said. "We want to move the paradigm beyond that to a service-based QOS, one built on the type of service we're trying to guarantee."

The ESP 6000 incorporates an H.323 gateway and supports voice compression and silence compression, enabling providers to migrate voice services to the same transmission facility they use for data-cutting voice transport costs without compromising quality, Terry said.

For now, service channels can be subscribed directly for the ESP 6000, but Abatis will soon roll out other parts of its system architecture. A network service contractor, due in the fourth quarter, is a Unix- or NT-based software suite for central offices that perform bandwidth provisioning and policy management.

LOGICAL TESTING CableLabs will use TeraLogic's TL850-based Cougar digital TV reference platform as part of a test system for electronics manufacturers to develop products for OpenCable interoperability compliance.

ACTV BUILDS HYPERTV Digital media company ACTV Inc. is building the first POP for its HyperTV network at Exodus Communications' New York data center. When complete, the POP should allow up to 100,000 simultaneous HyperTV subscribers to watch video on standard TV while viewing pushed synchronized Web content and chatting on their PCs.