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The SMB VoIP Market Accelerates: Hosted vs. Premise
Worldwide SMB IP telephony spending will exceed $4.5 billion during 2008, according to some estimates, suggesting a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 41.3%. What's driving the growth? Here's a look at some fundamentals of both hosted and premise-based SMB VoIP solutions. |
Marek Kotelba |
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Boosting Link Reliability for Telco Triple Play
Crosstalk is perhaps one of the major factors impairing performance of VDSL2 networks in always-on, triple play deployments. Severe crosstalk noise resulting from the on/off switching of DSL lines can cause link drops or acute performance degradation, which results in service disruptions. To alleviate this problem, service providers need an intelligent and automated technology that will allow them to ensure link integrity and dynamically adapt to optimum data rates in the presence of sudden, and large noise changes without interruption of the service. |
Dr. Manouchehr Rafie and Kenneth Madison |
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Securing IMS Networks
The Home Subscriber Server (HSS) is an important new system in the IMS environment. It can be thought of as the modern day Home Location Register (HLR), providing a comprehensive view into all customer information and data so that a unified communications experience can be delivered to users.
However, the HSS as a monolithic database represents a potential single point of failure and a highly attractive target for both internal and external attacks. |
Steve Duffy |
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It’s All About Access -- A Comparison of Fiber vs Copper in 2008
Service providers today have one ultimate goal: build a broadband network that enables the delivery of a wide array of new revenue-enhancing voice, video and data services. These multi-play offerings allow a service provider to attract and retain customers during a tenuous period when their fixed line revenue is declining and they are reaching the saturation point in their mobile business.
For a service provider, success ultimately depends on the access network architecture it chooses to deploy. The approach a service provider takes in building its network can vary greatly: from a complete fiber overbuild to maximizing the investment in their existing copper infrastructure.
This article will examine the pros and cons of deploying fiber and copper, while providing an overview of the time, costs and performance associated with each architecture and the characteristics of standards in use today. |
Piyush Sevalia |
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Programmable Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) for Service Providers
In order to address the challenges of IP convergence, many service providers are utilizing Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. DPI products allow service providers to monitor and control traffic at all layers of the protocol stack (including the application layer) based on a set of policies. The first generation of DPI products were adept at solving specific problems; however they are not flexible enough to resolve the emerging network challenges or implement new services. A new generation of programmable DPI platforms is now being implemented. |
Tim Waters |
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Web 2.0 and the Intelligent Network – How a Superior User Experience can be Guaranteed
If the new wave of applications and architectures currently planned are to succeed (Web 2.0, SOA, etc.), the underlying infrastructures on which they run will need a dramatic shift in capabilities. Without change, many of these new initiatives will fail as they inevitably fall prey to any of a number of security threats, performance bottlenecks and inability to fulfill expectations on user experience. The rich content and nature of Web 2.0 and SOA architectures makes for more security vulnerabilities. This also necessitates the need for strict control of delivery performance across multiple networks and better capabilities that enable management of application delivery from datacenter to end-users who utilize increasingly diverse fixed and mobile devices. |
Chris Komatas |
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Delivering Optimal Video on Demand Services
The road to a successful VoD deployment is rarely smooth and straightforward. Here is a look at key deployment issues with the potential to impact the amount of network bandwidth required or the ability of the network to scale appropriately in order to meet the demands of subscribers. |
Taran Singh |
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DOCSIS 3.0, Raising the Standard
DOCSIS 3.0 ushers in an era of breathtakingly faster line speeds supporting new applications that hold the promise of expanded revenue streams for operators. At a minimum, DOCSIS 3.0 starts by increasing a subscriber’s bandwidth up to 160 Mbps downstream and 120 Mbps upstream. Here is a look at the enabling technology. |
Ran Senderovitz and Etai Zaltsman |
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Mobile Device Management: The Catalyst for Profitable Data Service Enablement
Mobile device management (MDM) solutions enable operators to provision, support and secure both built-in and preinstalled services such as WAP or MMS, as well as services that can be delivered after the fact, such as enterprise-level email, customer relationship management (CRM) or other applications that require software to be installed or upgraded on the device remotely. |
Matt Bancroft |
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Point of Disconnect: Internet Traffic and the U.S. Communications Infrastructure
Is the Internet infrastructure ready to handle the rapid growth of multimedia and mobile IP traffic? Consider that the most popular YouTube video download as of July 2007 was “Evolution of Dance”, a six minute video added in 2006, which had over 52 million downloads. This one video generated traffic roughly equivalent to a month of data network traffic in 2000. |
Professor Michael Kleeman |
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Deep Traffic Worm Detection and Containment
Enterprise networks are increasingly offloading the responsibility for worm detection and containment to the carrier networks. However, current detection approaches, such as those based on content similarity of packet payloads, have not been very effective against the zero-day and other new types of extremely distributed and sophisticated worms. |
Antonio Nucci and Supranamaya Ranjan |
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Scaling Content Delivery for IPTV and WebTV
New challenges are underway in serving and storing digital content for on-demand viewing via IPTV or WebTV. As the amount of digital content accumulates, storing the data and making it instantly accessible to a large number of viewers are proving to be significant issues. |
Gary Orenstein |
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The Evolution of the WLAN SOHO Market
New tactics for service providers to increase revenue are changing the wireless LAN (WLAN) landscape. The channels that provide WLAN products in the small office / home office (SOHO) market are quickly transitioning from the traditional retail environment to one in which service providers directly supply these products to their broadband subscribers. Lesser known names like Thomson, Siemens, and 2Wire are displacing the more familiar consumer brands in home networking, such as Linksys, D-Link, and NETGEAR. Here is an overview of the changing landscape. |
Elmer Choy |
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Poised for Growth: Small Business and VoIP
Consumers and global enterprises are flocking to VoIP-based services. Now, the hole in the middle of the donut -- those 35 million small and medium sized businesses (SMB) worldwide -- is starting to come around; and for many good reasons. |
Debbie Greenstreet and Angela Raucher |
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It's a Wonderful Digital Life
In this interview Greg Jones, General Manager, Service Provider Strategic Marketing at Texas Instruments discusses the concept of the Digital Life. |
Greg Jones |
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Testing Wireless Home Entertainment Networks for HD Video: UWB vs. 802.11
The delivery of video content – especially high-definition streams – in a home is an extremely demanding application. It’s so data intensive, in fact, that it outstrips the capacity of even existing cabling. For this reason, many telecommunications service providers and consumer electronics companies are looking for a new solution for distributing high-definition video. Validating the capabilities of new products and technologies can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. |
Dan Karr |
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HD Voice: Can VoIP Do Better Than "Carrier Grade"?
Constrained by the limitations of analog transducers and network bandwidth in its early days, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) transports only a small slice of what people can hear. Even though the range of the ear extends from 20 Hz to 20 KHz, a typical analog phone call only transmits sound in the 200 Hz to 3.3 KHz range. As IP phones become more and more prevalent in homes, SMBs and global enterprises, wideband HD voice communication will become more common. A digital channel from end-to-end is needed for a wideband call, but this does not preclude a wired-to-wireless HD call. |
Ravi Kodavarti |
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Reinventing the IAD
The boundary between service provider network and residential subscriber is rapidly blurring. At the heart of this evolution is the vision of the "digital home", which offers service providers an opportunity to generate additional revenue through bundled services and associated service level agreements. |
Sanjeev Challa |
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Leveraging MoCA for In-home Networking
A home digital entertainment network consists of multiple streams of standard and high definition content distributed anywhere, anytime throughout the home. There are numerous technologies and mediums vying to become the standard in the digital home but not all are created equal. Here is the case for using existing coax cabling as your in-home networking solution. |
Anton Monk |
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Top Five Ways the Next 5 Years of Voice Communications Will Be Different than the Past 5 Years
Today, virtually every major network operator is either deploying IP technology or finalizing plans for doing so, and over the next few years, the impact will be felt by everyone. Here are some top trends as we look ahead to the next five years. |
Dr. Hassan Ahmed |
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