Advertisment

The New Bandwidth Market

author-image
VoicenData Bureau
New Update

The word "bandwidth" has recently been used to describe any telecom

goods that have been sold as "unbranded" products on an exchange or

through private transactions. This article focuses essentially on TDM clear

channels (as opposed to voice minutes, colocation space, etc.), which is, in our

minds, the product that is most appropriate to quickly become a commodity. The

reasons for this are relatively simple. They include a large growth potential

(the number of voice minutes you could potentially use in the world is limited),

as well as a relative ease of defining and measuring Quality of Service (QoS).

Advertisment

The Forces Driving this Market

The telecom world has historically been characterized by long provisioning

times (from 45 to even 90 days sometimes), often leading to contract

renegotiations at the time of connection because of a change in needs or the

perception of a market price change. The developing bandwidth market brings the

following benefits to its participants:

Benefits to buyers:

Advertisment
  • One interconnection point, which gives them access to all

    participants connected at the same place, without having to worry about

    possible delays in network interconnection.

  • Ability to quickly and anonymously expand geographic

    coverage, without being subject to price manipulation from major dominant

    carriers

  • Lower search and transaction cost

  • Monitoring and enforcement of QoS.

Benefits to sellers:

  • Enables one to temporarily sell excess capacity without

    cannibalizing their more lucrative ‘branded’ products. The quick

    provisioning times allow carriers to sell shorter-term contracts and recover

    the capacity at the end of the contract if they need it for some of their

    preferred customers

  • Creates an alternative (cheaper) sales channel that

    enables carriers to transact with counterparts they might not even know

    existed in the ‘old world’, essentially because of the increasing number

    of participants in the market

  • Fewer contract negotiations, therefore fewer inventories

    and more revenue

Advertisment

The Working

The model is relatively simple. Buyers and sellers all interconnect in one

physical location ("pooling point", "delivery hub" are words

that are now used interchangeably by the industry to describe such

interconnection points), usually located in some colocation facility or carrier

hotel. The participants basically occupy a port on a digital cross-connect.

Buyers and sellers post offers to buy and sell capacity on an online trading

system such as the one operated by RateXchange, where market participants will

be able to lift offers. In order to execute a transaction, the cross-connect

will establish a connection between the buyer’s network and the seller’s

network for the agreed-upon capacity.

How the Bandwidth Market

Works

Advertisment

QoS will be monitored and reported to the interested parties to ensure that

the terms of the contract are respected.



Intranets Combine Internet Technology with Corporate Network Control

Intranet deployment requires an

existing network that supports the TCP/IP protocol suite and related Internet

applications. TCP/IP provides the fundamental set of communication protocols

that permit basic connectivity between networks and individual desktop systems.

Internet applications (e-mail, Web browsing, file transfer, terminal emulation,

etc.) provide the tools and services that allow workers to share information

across one or more LANs, a WAN, or the Internet. These applications

significantly increase demand for bandwidth.

Advertisment

Intranet Applications Increase Bandwidth Demands

Of all the Internet applications, the

Web browser has been the greatest driver of corporate intranet development. They

have been called the Swiss army knife interface to information because they are

platform independent and provide users with transparent access to FTP, Gopher,

Telnet, Network News, e-mail, online content search, and interactive database

queries. The tremendous popularity of Web browsers lies in their potential to

act as the universal client interface for any client/server application.

Emergence of TCP/IP

Advertisment

Over the years, efforts to simplify and

consolidate network operations has reduced the number of different protocols

running across enterprise networks, with TCP/IP emerging as the clear winner.

Looking back, there are a number of reasons for the inevitable emergence of

TCP/IP as the winner of the multi-protocol sweepstakes:

  • TCP/IP has a solid track record

    based on years of operational experience on the Internet.

  • TCP/IP was originally designed to

    provide efficient communication across both LANs and WANs; over the years,

    it has demonstrated its ability to scale to global proportions.

  • TCP/IP provides universal

    information exchange between all types of end systems PCs, Macintosh

    computers, Unix platforms, supercomputers (Crays, NECs), mainframes (IBM,

    Tandem, etc.), minicomputers (HP3000, AS/400), etc.

  • TCP/IP has developed a robust set

    of network management tools & #151; Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP),

    Remote Monitoring (RMON), RMON2 & #151; and network management platform

    support from leading vendors.

  • TCP/IP has an active development

    community (the Internet Engineering Task Force or IETF) to continually

    enhance and extend existing tools, develop new tools, and extend the

    protocol suite.

  • Internet applications run over

    TCP/IP, not IPX, AppleTalk, DECnet, OSI, or VINES. To deploy native Internet

    applications on desktops, the network must be running TCP/IP.

Explosion of Corporate Intranets

Advertisment

The public Internet is based on TCP/IP

technology that has been evolving for the past 30 years into a remarkable tool.

Until recently, the riches of the Internet were not readily available to novice

computer users due to the lack of a user interface. It was the development of

easy-to-use, point-and-click Web browsers like NCSA Mosaic, Netscape Navigator,

and Microsoft Internet Explorer that fueled the recent growth of the Internet

and the World Wide Web.

Web browsers were first adopted by

organizations to support inter-enterprise communications across the Internet.

Typically, an enterprise developed an Internet presence and deployed a Web

server to provide sales, marketing, and support information to external users.

As time passed, organizations realized the financial and strategic benefits of

using Web technology to provide information to internal users; the corporate

intranet. Many believe that the next evolutionary step will be the development

of secure extended intranets where Web technology is used to reach key external

customers and suppliers and to support all business transactions electronically.



Common Intranet Information Sharing Model

According to Forrester Research, 22

percent of the Fortune 1000 companies currently use Web servers for internal

applications, and another 40 percent are seriously considering their deployment

in the near future. Zona Research predicts that by the year 2000 there will be

nearly 3.3 million private intranet servers, as opposed to 650,000 for the

public Internet. There are many forces driving organizations to migrate their

internal information management systems to the intranet model:

  • Intranets flatten the information

    delivery system within an organization, delivering content on demand. They

    foster the rapid exchange of information required to support reduced product

    life cycles, increased cost pressures, demand for customer service, and

    rapidly changing markets.

  • The information on Web servers has

    the potential to be the latest and most accurate. Information can be

    cross-linked to provide point-and- click access to any other document within

    the organization or around the world.

  • Intranets are based on open

    standards. This plays an important role in overcoming problems with

    incompatible computing environments (UNIX, MacOS, DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows

    95, Windows NT, OS/2, VMS, etc.) that previously prevented universal access

    to information.

  • Desktop browsers can be modified to

    function as the client interface for almost any client/server application.

    Since they are intuitive and extremely easy to use, browsers do not require

    a large investment in training.

  • Intranets provide a high level of

    security. Many organizations do not have a direct connection to the global

    Internet, and if they are do, they can protect their intranet using an

    Internet firewall system. Java-enabled browsers support strong memory

    protection, encryption and signatures, and run-time verification.

Internet Firewall System

The prevailing desktop-centric model of

computing is implemented by the deployment of heterogeneous fat clients. A fat

client is a desktop system that is loaded with a complex operating system, local

configuration files, a number of popular desktop



applications, and a variety of incompatible client applications for each network
services. In contrast, the network-centric model of computing motivated by the

corporate intranet is based on the deployment of thin clients with Java and/or

ActiveX-enabled browsers.

By deploying thin clients, network

managers can greatly reduce the complexity and administrative expense of running

their networks. Sun Microsystems estimates that the annual cost of operating

Java-based clients will be less than $2,500/desktop, compared to a $10,000 to

$15,000/desktop range for today’s fat clients.

Thin Client Implementing a Java Webtop

Internet applications provide better

performance within a corporate intranet than they do across the Internet. Most

individual systems are connected to the Internet at data rates from 28.8/33.6

Kbps to the emerging 56 Kbps dial rates. Corporate users may have access at

rates ranging from 128 Kbps (ISDN BRI) up to T1/E1 Mbps, but this may still seem

relatively slow since the bandwidth is shared by many other workstations. In

contrast, corporate intranets generally provide each desktop with access to

local Web servers at data rates of 10/100 Mbps.

Intranets are based on inexpensive

technology that is widely deployed in many private networks. If the enterprise

has TCP/IP on its network, it can easily install Web servers and browsers. This

allows organizations to slowly migrate to the intranet model without discarding

a single computing platform or application.

Challenges for Network Managers

In many enterprises, the deployment of

internal Web servers is a grassroots operation. The proliferation of HyperText

Markup Language (HTML) editors has eased the burden of content creation, and Web

servers are springing up all over organizations, in many cases without the

knowledge or cooperation of the local network administrator or the traditional

IS department. Network administrators who have been accustomed to carefully

planning for traffic flows and bandwidth requirements associated with the

rollout of a network operating system upgrade or a new client/server application

are facing new challenges with the rapid migration to the intranet model:

  • Internal Web sites with large

    graphic or multimedia content will make increasing bandwidth demands on the

    corporate infrastructure. The total volume of network traffic will grow as

    the content from bandwidth-intensive pages is transmitted across the

    organization’s infrastructure.

  • The rollout of new applications

    based on Java and/or ActiveX applets can result in additional bandwidth and

    performance challenges. In the current client/server model, specialized

    client software is preinstalled on the user’s hard drive for each server

    that needs to be accessed. In the intranet model, applets are downloaded

    from the Web server to the client as they are needed. Although this greatly

    reduces LAN administrative costs, it can cause network congestion and slow

    response times.

  • Intranet traffic flows will be

    impossible to predict and constantly changing. Since the goal of the

    intranet is to enable free exchange of information, network managers will

    not be able to predict in advance where the traffic bottlenecks will appear.

    In contrast to the traditional client/server model, in which large pipes can

    be provisioned to provide adequate bandwidth at the core of the network,

    user-developed Web servers are typically located on shared media at the edge

    of the network. The infrastructure at the periphery may not have sufficient

    capacity to support access from clients located across the enterprise. In

    addition, narrow WAN communication pipes may experience increased traffic

    volumes. Intranets can result in severe network congestion and performance

    problems at random locations across the enterprise network infrastructure.

  • All of these changes will have a

    negative impact on the performance of existing client/server and legacy

    applications. These applications must now fight for basic bandwidth in a

    network environment in which there are increasing traffic volumes and

    unpredictable/unstable loads.

Supporting Intranet Applications

In an Intranet environment, it is

imperative that network managers deploy RMON and RMON2 probes to gather baseline

information about traffic flows and application trends. RMON and proactive

monitoring are the keys to optimizing existing LAN and WAN resources, uncovering

bottlenecks before they appear, establishing policies regarding the use of

applications on the enterprise intranet, and making wise decisions about

capacity planning and future growth.

After potentially disruptive trends are

discovered via RMON/RMON2, network managers have several options meeting the

challenges to efficient network operation. They can provide additional LAN

bandwidth and improve performance by deploying layer 2 switches at the network

edge. They can provide increased traffic control and packet throughput by

deploying intelligent switches with Fast IP at the network core. Finally, they

can use bandwidth-grooming features to overcome bottlenecks resulting from

increased bandwidth demands on narrow WAN links.

Chuck Semeria, Courtesy: 3Com



For all further information, email at Sayan_Ghosh@3Com.com

Advertisment