Delivering the goods

With North American DSL connections now nearing 1 million and cable modem subscribers at more than twice that, there's a real sense in the ISP community that the initial obstacles to widespread deployment of highspeed access have been overcome. With a sizable installed base in place, service providers now are looking for enhancements that will drive speedy Internet access deeper into the marketplace, both among residential and commercial consumers.

Applications, virtual private networks (VPNs), streaming and live content delivery are some of the tools that service providers are looking to as they attempt to drive customer access speeds - and their own revenues - and higher.

Content and e-business delivery network Digital Island recently partnered with VideoScape.net to create the Footprint Interactive webcast videoconferencing service, which will be available worldwide. The new service enables ISPs, application service providers (ASPs) and enterprise customers to convert existing ISDN videoconferencing systems for Internet broadcasting, including streaming audio and video, posting presentations and reaching audiences with instant text messaging. The service encodes a digital signal into all major streaming formats, then sends it over Digital Island's global infrastructure, which can handle up to 250,000 concurrent streams.

"Any company that's got H.323-compliant videoconferencing equipment can now use that to do a webcast," says Pat Greer, Digital Island's director of content delivery. "No scheduling is needed. They just go to a Web site, get a personal identification number, dial up a number, enter their PIN and it's out there."

Greer sees a strong market for the service in analyst calls and corporate presentations. Digital Island is now working with a large entertainment company to webcast a bi-weekly CEO message to its worldwide employees, he says.

Adding those capabilities to its network of five data centers and 1200 content distributors in 24 countries was not difficult, Greer says. "We'd been working alongside VideoScape.net for quite a while and just wanted to integrate more closely," he says. "It was literally a few lines of code in their server, and we were integrated. But the advantage now is that those streams are being delivered from hundreds of different servers around the world, and both the quality of the streams and the user experience is much better than if we'd tried to do it out of a central location."

Content delivery is only one of four parts of Digital Island's business; the other elements are its global ATM private network, Web-hosting services at the data centers and selected applications services such as its TraceWare product for managing content rights and targeting advertising geographically. The content delivery business grew out of Digital Island's purchase last year of Sandpiper Networks, Greer says.

With the backbone of Digital Island's content delivery system about 95% finished, the next move is out to the edge of the network. "We're signing up DSL providers and cable networks, and we're starting to put streaming and caching servers in the DSL access multiplexers and the cable headends," Greer says. "For content delivery, it's our major initiative."

As more customers sign up for broadband at home, entertainment companies and the other big content providers are anxious to get their product into homes and offices. And although encoding rates are still an obstacle to streaming multimedia content, the biggest gating factor is still the pace of installation of high-speed access.

"I think it's now just above 10% of users who have broadband," Greer says. "That proportion needs to be at least 25%."

IP does it all

Broadwing is the first service provider to announce the rollout of an IP network-based VPN service (Figure 1).

So far, most VPN services have involved frame relay or required customer premises equipment to set up a tunnel, either through an ISP's private network or the Internet. Traffic going through that tunnel is encrypted for security. But using new edge switches called IP service class delivery systems, an ISP can create VPNs that are 100% IP-based.

That's as it should be, says Dominick DeAngelo, Broadwing's president of data and Internet services. The result is a convergence of voice and data networks at the enterprise level - along with significant cost savings - and enhanced revenue for the ISP.

"The interesting thing about the data world in the last 10 years has been the convergence of applications and transport technology," DeAngelo says. "Frame relay took off because LANs were being connected, distributed processing became important and nothing else really handled that well. ATM was goingto be the desktop convergence [platform], but the market preferred it as a bandwidth manager with the promise of voice."

IP is valuable because it can handle the high speeds that today's marketplace demands, he says. "It may not be the prettiest backbone without quality of service, but it can handle it."

Broadwing's eClass VPN service is an outgrowth of that IP capability. The service includes connectivity for LANs, extranets and mobile users and features quality of service queuing capabilities to prioritized packets containing voice or video. Among the first customers for eClass VPN are National-Louis University and QuantumCast, a voice-over-IP solution provider running business-grade long-distance IP voice over the service.

They soon may have company. One of the first things other customers have asked about the eClass VPN service was whether they could run voice over it, DeAngelo says. "We know we can because we've already integrated IP voice into our network through an agreement with ZeroPlus.com," he says. Broadwing also has reached an agreement with V-Span for videoconferencing over its IP backbone, and it has plans for more services.

The ability to handle these applications signals IP's superiority as a transport mode for converged services, DeAngelo says. "I'm really converging on this backbone," he says. "The proof of the pudding is our eClass VPN, but I can also do video more easily than most, and I can do voice on it. With Broadwing's fiber backbone, I now can tell my customers, `Tell me what you're going to do, and I'm not going to ask if it's voice, video or data. Tell me the application, and here's the bandwidth.'"

Usage-based billing for eClass VPN and its other converged services also will let Broadwing's customers grow into the higher bandwidths in stages - to fit their allotted bandwidth to their changing needs.

"Our vision is, if you want an OC-48 tomorrow for three hours and an OC-12 the next day, you can have it," DeAngelo says. "Then you watch what the customers will do with that - what content will be distributed, what applications will be developed."

Edge computing

ASP USinternetworking faces the dilemma common to many other ASPs: How do you deliver a premium Internet experience when the product the customer is getting via your network - rented software - is supplied by a third party and therefore largely out of your control?

USi recognized that the answer was related to caching, which puts data users' wants at the edge of the network so they can retrieve it without the hops that a centrally located server would require. But standard caching takes in mostly static content such as pictures and other high-bandwidth data elements that don't change. Most of USi's content is dynamic in nature - forms, transactions and apps.

"We found a partner in SightPath that had experience with caching in the enterprise domain," says Kurt Gastrock, USi's vice president of engineering. "They were doing live video streams over corporate intranets, so they'd dealt with these time-sensitive, delay-sensitive applications for the enterprise world."

At the same time, USi called upon its own expertise in running its menu of outsourced software. Most of those applications run on a database, and the company knew how to replicate that database in geographically dispersed locations, with high availability and disaster recovery functions.

"To us, that smelled a lot like caching," Gastrock says. "So we married that ability to distribute a dynamic database to a bunch of different locations with a static caching capability that sits on a Web-type front end." The result was the USiAccelerate network, an architecture customized for the delivery of the specific solutions that USi supplies.

In fact, the ASP found that it knew enough about how customers used those applications to pinpoint modular portions that tend to get more hits than others and could optimize even further by caching those elements of the software at the network's edge along with the static content.

"In effect, USiAccelerate gives us the ability to do computing from the edge of the network, rather than just storing content there," Gastrock says. "That's a key differentiator for USi."

The first release on the USiAccelerate network should come in July, when USi ports its BroadVision e-commerce offering. The ASP will then progress down its application stack, bringing over its online solutions one at a time.

"You have to look inside each application and understand what makes sense to push out to the edge, then figure out how to do that in a robust way and finally manage that app," Gastrock says. "It's not a one-size-fits-all operation, although that common database is really the key that leverages everything."

Bandwidth constraints are not the concern for USi that they are for the average network, because USi delivers over the Internet - through a contractual arrangement it calls "priority peering" - and private IP networks. The Internet is still too rife with inadequate peering, making it unpredictable, although Gastrock believes the reliability of the Internet is on a gradual upswing.

"The Internet's getting better every day, and with quality of service coming on and congestion becoming slowly less prevalent, I think it will be possible someday to move to a full Internet delivery environment," he says.

Future refinements in the USi infrastructure will more likely be driven by new applications than by advances in the basic caching technology. "We're not seeing any ground-breaking new technology coming out," Gastrock says.

New techniques in streaming media and in cache routing may come along, however, and when they do, USi will be ready to bolt them onto its highly modular, highly scalable network, he says. "Do those advances and capabilities create a more interesting end-user experience or enable new kinds of applications?" Gastrock asks. "Who's going to take advantage of these interesting functions and create something useful with them?"

A new convergence

The drive to provide new content and applications also is producing a new convergence of manufacturers and equipment vendors - or rather, their venture business divisions - with the ASPs and content delivery providers already in the space.

Lucent Technologies will launch GeoVideo Networks to provide high-speed video delivery for business-to-business applications. The service will use a private fiber optic network leased from Metromedia Fiber Network to avert possible Internet congestion. The first link, between New York and Los Angeles, will be completed this spring.

More ambitious is Intel's plan, announced last month, to launch an Internet streaming media service. With thousands of edge points of presence (POPs) already deployed, mostly at private peering points, Intel is spending $200 million to construct a pair of data storage and broadcast centers in Portland, Ore., and London (Figure 2).

The new division, Intel Internet Media Services, connects its POPs to these streaming media and hosting centers with private fiber optic lines and will have the capacity to stream up to 1000 simultaneous broadcasts.

It's a good strategic move for Intel, says David Wu, an analyst for ABN Amro. "Accessing rich content over the Web calls for processing power within the computer. It may be a long-term strategy, but this could help foster new markets for Intel's core chip products."