ISPs: Painting A New Canvas

Ian
Pearson, the futurologist at British Telecom, who tracks
developments in technology and predicts the way of life in the
years to come always mentions in his views one fact,
"Accuracy is impossible to all but the most trivial
questions and blurred visions are better than none at all!"
This is typically true for the emerging Internet scene. More
true in the Indian context. The definition of IT is clearly
shifting from information technology to Internet technology. The
success of organizations would depend on how efficiently they
harness Internet.

The
year 1999 was seen as a watershed year for Internet when private
ISPs were allowed in the country. Companies sprang up as ISPs to
provide the services. But as competition gets intense, the big
question is how to differentiate and position oneself to take
advantage of the emerging business scenario.

The key is innovative
thinking. That is why we have seen the mushrooming of cybercafes,
coming of DSL technologies, etc. The rule of the game is
creating and deploying newer services and business models.

The ISP Canvas
and Influences

At a recently held conference for the ISPs in Bangalore,
organized by the Informatics Division of Crompton Greaves Ltd,
Ananth MS, director (ISP solutions), CG Digital, pointed out
that there is no concise and specific definition of what an ISP
is or what an ISP ought to do. And if there were, it would not
be current for long. ISPs today have to adopt to the new
landscape of e-commerce. Both lifestyles and businesses will
depend on Internet.

If one looks at the canvas
today, it is unorganized or unaligned. On one hand you have
access providers, content hosters, network providers, and
application providers. On the other, there is the customer,
entertainment agencies, advertising and promotion agencies,
sponsors, systems, etc. There is minimal alignment.

On the other hands, we are
witnessing that change is only the constant factor. At the
component level we have seen that we have moved from 3 microns
to 0.12 microns, from centralized to departmental computers,
from low speed to higher speed ple-synchronous to asynchronous,
from analog to digital interfaces, from proprietary to network
standards. If this was happening on the hardware side, the user
interface and software side too witnessed changes. From
text-based commands to GUI, from centralized apps to client
server apps, from application-specific to browserized GUIs, from
custom to rapid-prototyping, from proprietary to RDBMS to object
databases.

By aligning, duplication
of resources can be prevented. In fact, this will give the
flexibility to leverage on one another’s strengths. There are
several ways to look at the Internet. For an ISP the model of
interest is the "distribution" model. An ISP is a
service-based company that resells bandwidth. It pays a monthly
or annual fee to an upstream provider for a high-speed link to
the Internet backbones, and resells connectivity in smaller
chunks to its customer base. By now everyone has become
acquainted with the vast potential of the Internet to expand
communications, provide entertainment, and increase commerce.
The topological model deals with the Internet infrastructure.
The distribution model is how an ISP fits into the market. The
commerce model is how the ISP’s customers look at the
Internet.India and the
Net Context

Aligning in different directions and different types of
organizations can give the advantage to an ISP. An ISP needs to
position as either an access provider, or customer, or content
provider, or infrastructure provider, etc. or a combination of
these. Clearly, the success would depend on how one aligns and
on how well one can handle the three key parameters–customer,
geography, and services. The emerging scene would be in three
dimensions (see figure). The first dimension would include the
topology model–the infrastructure. This would mean the
systems, networks, security, content creators, application
creators, universities, VPNs, workflow extranets, local content,
and delivery mechanisms. The second dimension will have
customers, access providers, content hosting, consumer services,
entertainment, education, industrial, government, and Quality of
Life (QoL) applications. The third would see the sponsors and
Advertising and Promotion (A&P) agencies. Though there would
be several changes in the coming years, content hosting,
access providers, and customers will remain more or less
constant in the three said dimensions. But the QoL apps and the
nature of commerce business will change a lot.

It is in this kind of a
scenario that the role of Multi Services Operators (MSOs) and
networks will be one of the key methods of reaching the
customer. That is as a communications services delivery
infrastructure providers catering to diverse traffic types,
diverse applications, and differentiated services. Today, the
challenges are such that the MSO needs to be geared up for not
only catering to the traditional voice or data streams, but also
real-time and asynchronous voice, data, image, and video. The
applications are getting diverse too. It must be able to support
ERP both traditional and net-oriented, e-commerce, distance
learning, telemedicine, extranets, GroupWare, GPS, image
analysis applications, online transactions, to name a few.
Besides this, they need to differentiate their services. It has
to guarantee services, bandwidth, uptime etc. In fact, quality
of service reliability and availability and managed services
will hold the sway.

As the race to acquire
market share becomes increasingly fierce, the service providers
who can most rapidly introduce new services and respond to
customers’ changing needs would have the competitive edge.
This agility hinges on network infrastructures with a rich set
of features and functionality, the support of multiple
interfaces, and distributed, software-defined intelligence.

The MSO
Network

What a multi-service network architecture does is combine the
multiple layers of legacy architecture into fewer network
elements, thereby removing barriers to operational efficiency
and flexibility. Convergence creates a unified network that
operates cohesively to promote efficiency, enhance service
features, and offer cost savings–key elements of today’s
competitive marketplace. The multi-service dexterity offers some
key advantages for network providers–it attracts more users to
the network; it offers the ability to bill flexibly and
accurately for those services; and provides manageability for
carrier reliability, quality, and cost efficiency.The advantage they could
derive, besides the cost advantage, would be by offering some
compelling new services such as

• Business services:
  Service providers can target lucrative vertical markets,
  such as financial services, professional business services,
  and health care

• Global VPNs: These
  enable business users to enjoy the security and
  functionality of private networks, using Internet domain.
  Because access and bandwidth can be billed separately in
  this architecture, service providers will have the
  flexibility to put premium prices on quality of service and
  bandwidth availability.

• Unified networks
  solution: It enables services to follow subscribers wherever
  they go and on whatever devices they want to receive
  communications. This level of connectivity and end-user
  control is made possible by multi-service gateways, central
  network intelligence and good backbones

• Customized services:
  Service providers will be able to deploy IP-enabled
  applications that weren’t possible on the legacy platform.
  This process can be simplified by having access to a toolkit
  of applications programming interfaces based on
  multi-vendor, multi-platform technology.

Some recent trends are
very clear. The trend toward convergence of legacy
circuit-switched, time-division multiplexing (TDM)-based
networks, and packet-switched data networks is clear to
everyone. And there is an increasing demand for service
applications that leverage this convergence; blending Internet
content and functionality with calling services normally
associated with the PSTN. Internet application devices, visual
mobile handsets based on the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP),
put the vast resources of the web in the palm. And emerging
support for real-time voice and video communications over
high-speed data networks promises even greater capabilities for
subscribers, and revenue opportunities for service providers.
MSOs can give subscribers what they want today, while staying
ahead of the bend tomorrow.