Smart networks to transform telecoms

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

An open and more intelligent network that can push services to the edge will help transform today's telecoms operators, drastically cut costs and provide a better mobility experience for the end user. Cisco marketing manager for broadband and intelligent services Robert Synnestvedt said that this year Cisco had gone to its Networkers 2008 event in Barcelona with application partners rather than with switches and routers to show how connectivity meant more than CAT5 cable and huge network switches.

But while Cisco now prefers to start the conversation at the application, it is the next generation of routers and switches which conduct the services, the security and transport elements that would build up the Internet experience.

In the past, a well-established example is that of telcos providing hosting services. Today telcos such as AT&T and France Telecom are providing Cisco's Telepresence as a service and outsourced voice and communications as a service. The market is expanding down to the SMB space and with thinner margins, the operators themselves looking to partners to provide the service across their network. Another way of explaining the sea change is comparing it to the move from DOS to Windows, as more and more elements become standarised as part of a toolkit so that developers can focus on application logic rather than on drawing dialogue boxes.

By having standards and security managed by the network, you could benefit from the economies of scale and reduce complexity, he said. In other words, the network of the future that Cisco is promoting is more like a layer of middleware than a traditional transport network.

For instance, today if someone needs to download and open a Powerpoint presentation on a mobile phone, it is possible, but it is very bandwidth-intensive and wasteful, as the file will have high-resolution files that are far too detailed to see on a mobile phone screen. An intelligent network could translate the presentation and transmit only a cut-down version that is optimised for a mobile phone.

Another example is the web experience itself. Today we have a PC-oriented Web, which is not optimised for handsets. Many companies have created WAP sites, but what if the network can cut and re-organise the Web for a mobile experience automatically, saving bandwidth and giving a better experience at the same time.

Then there are security services that operators can provide over the network as a service. The key difference between the status quo and Cisco's vision of managed services is that the security software could be running on the edge. Rather than have to route information through the network to the security company's servers and back, the security company could provide software that runs in the routers belonging to the operator where it would be most efficient.

Even mundane things such as mobile phone billing can be done at the edge now, without having to poll a central database server all the time to see if the user still has sufficient credit to continue talking. The other key difference is price, as running applications on the network in the routers themselves potentially offers cost savings of an order of magnitude over traditional configurations.

He also noted that the major telcos in Thailand, TOT, True and AIS were talking about applications. Cisco has a service exchange framework to enable operators and developers to meet and build applications that work on this new network fabric