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ISPs: Painting A New Canvas

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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