PERSONAL INTERNET: The Fifth Pillar of Nortel Networks

Nortel Networks on 14 March in Hong Kong unveiled its

Personal Internet initiative for the Asia Pacific region. In a telephonic

interview with Voice & Data, Steve Wood, vice-president, Asia Pacific,

Content Networking Business Unit, Nortel Networks, explains the mission and

vision of the new initiative.

What is your definition of Personal Internet?

Personal Internet is all about taking Internet to the next

level of performance. The way we do it is to personalize the traffic in the

sessions that go across the Internet, in order to enable the concept of live

Internet. What we are talking about here is enhancing the end user experience

like delivering the content to the user with any device any time.

How do you see the Personal Internet technology

evolving?

The technology, which makes all this happen, resides at the

edge of the networks. When the user comes into the edge of the Internet at that

point our technology goes deeply into the packet where the session is coming

through and based on the inside information of the packet or session it will

make some intelligent decisions based on the content in the packet. Then our

technology is used to switch or route that traffic to the most optimal point in

the network to serve the customer. So it is a new concept. In the past all this

happened in the core of the network. And the control point for how the users

experience the traffic flow has now moved to the edge of the network. The

subscriber edge and the content edge of the network now use our technology--the

Alteon 437 technology and technology from Shasta to enable personal Internet.

What is Nortel’s vision and strategy in content

business?

Personal Internet is the fifth pillar in Nortel’s high

performance-Internet strategy. The other four being optical, wireless,

e-business, and local Internet for local campuses. The concept of personal

Internet is a multi-tier initiative of Nortel to deliver rich experience to the

end user at the edge of the network.

Cisco too has a content delivery initiative. How do you

compare that with yours?

Cisco has an offering and they are the only competitor at

this point in the space. We believe that their offering is that which pushes the

content to the edge of the network. Their environment is a closed solution, an

end-to-end Cisco solution, proprietary, and users may not be in a position to go

for the best of breed options.

While you have announced the personal Internet

initiative in the US in January, you are introducing the same now in APAC? What

is the difference?

We really want to address the APAC customers in a specific

way. So the Personal Internet initiative has been announced in Hong Kong in

March. We have about 600 customers in store with our web switching and Shasta

products today. There’s a big opportunity for Nortel because Internet is

growing at a very rapid pace from 72 million users now to 188 million users in

2004 in this area. The market here requires local breathing and local

positioning.

Who would your target customer be?

Our primary focus is the ISP customers, those of who have

an access PoP, those who may have a data centre, they may be content service

provider. Primarily it is going to be the service provider market. But

interestingly, we are seeing the enterprise making use of the application of

streaming media coming to the forefront. Customers like the financial

institutions who want to serve in a reliable and a high quality way through

streaming have shown keen interest. It’s because we can control the end point

of the content and end point of the subscriber edge. We can enable the

enterprises to serve the customers have a rich experience. So enterprises are

looking to that kind of a business.

In terms of geographical potential growth areas in APAC,

Korea, Australia, Japan, and China would be key. Personal Internet will pick up

where the concentration of Internet users pick up.

What is your estimate of revenues in Nortel’s earning

map?

Personal Internet revenues! Our business unit has plans to

achieve a billion dollars by the year end.

Ch. Srinivas Rao