10 Hottest Technologies

Telecommunications Americas, April, 2004 by Sean Buckley

It's funny how this industry works:

The slightest inkling of a recovery, and suddenly technology is sexy again. In truth, although many carriers and vendors slashed R&D dramatically, technology development never really went out of vogue. While executives did push opex savings and ROI to the forefront, they have always been planning their next technology steps, just perhaps not as publicly as they did in the late 1990s.

Over the past two years, our 10 Hottest Technologies picks were rooted in the here and now, i.e., what carriers were expected to implement in their networks that year. In 2004, we look on the horizon a bit and tackle those technologies under development or in trials that carriers will likely deploy over the next one or two years. However, these picks are far from leaps of faith. We've run these past carriers, vendors and a list of distinguished analysts to come up with this year's choices. Here, in no particular order, are Telecommunications[R] magazine's picks as the 10 Hottest Technologies for 2004:

PacketCable Multimedia *

Service Interworking *

Carrier-Class Network Security *

Line-Powered DSLAMs *

Wi-Fi/Cellular Roaming *

* Meshed Wireless Networking

* Hosted VoIP

* Active Ethernet

* Back Office Automation

* Resilient Packet Ring

See these technologies in action at the 10 Hottest Technologies Pavilion at SUPERCOMM 2004.

PacketCable Multimedia: Beyond Black Phones

Certainly, no one will argue that cable operators are serious about providing both traditional and VoIP based phone service. Yet, however compelling in the near term, cable operators will need to provide a suite of services to set their offerings apart from a basic telephony service from an ILEC.

"Whether they like it or not, broadband has become a commodity service, and I think cable operators are in a great position because of their understanding of how to create greater content for a specific service, like offering ESPN and VoD (video on demand)," said Lindsay Schroth, broadband access analyst for The Yankee Group. "By using the PCMM (PacketCable Multimedia) specification, cable operators can enhance a user's broadband experience by prioritizing or reserving bandwidth for latency-sensitive or feature-rich applications."

Leveraging their existing PacketCable and DOCSIS network infrastructure, which enabled them to enter the VoIP race, cable operators will add PCMM to include videoconferencing, gaming and SIP-based voice services, in addition to request-based bandwidth-on-demand applications.

Using the same QoS capabilities and bandwidth-reservation policies built into the DOCSIS 1.1 and PacketCable 1X specifications, the PCMM standard creates a framework that allows end-user devices to control and change the allocated bandwidth for various services. The PCMM architecture consists of six main elements. IP endpoints (PC, gaming consoles or SIP phones), cable modem, CMTS (cable modem termination system), record keeping server, policy server and an application manager.

Since the PCMM specification was introduced last year, CMTS (ADC, Motorola, ARRIS and Cisco), policy server (Camiant) and IP service management (Ellacoya and P-Cube) vendors have all begun to incorporate PCMM into their platforms.

In a typical scenario, once an end user chooses a specific service, an application manager will take that end-point request and send it to the policy server for the specific QoS-based service. From there, the policy server examines the request for its specific subscriber profile and applies the appropriate QoS and security to that service. Finally, the policy server will apply a policy to the request and send these messages to the CMTS, which will allocate the appropriate bandwidth for the service.

Steve Craddock, executive vice president of Comcast's New Media Group, sees big potential for PCMM beyond basic voice. "The PacketCable NCS (Network Call Signaling) standard is based on primary line VoIP and it's network-centric, so people can't take over the network, but if we stick with that we're just in the black phone business," he said. "We say, keep your black phone, but by creating a SIP proxy, which talks SIP to the endpoint and enforces network policy, you get the best of both worlds. The beauty of that is I can use the same softswitch for VoIP and put PCMM on those switches to do video telephony without changing the switch out."

--Sean Buckley

Service Interworking: United We Stand

Is convergence really dead, or have service providers just rethought their ideas of what convergence means? According to Current Analysis senior analyst Joe McGarvey, what service providers have been looking for all along is "not a single technology or protocol--ATM, MPLS, IP--to unify their various networks, but a mechanism that enables all their various networks to behave as a unified entity." Enter service interworking. This translation, so to speak, of one protocol to another, is a step beyond mere network interworking, in which the protocols are tunneled across one another.

McGarvey says the No. 1 goal of service providers in terms of service interworking is being able to intermingle access technologies--DSL, Ethernet, frame relay--yet have an agnostic front end to their VPNs. "For an enterprise that wants a faster connection from one of its satellite offices to headquarters, the service provider can put in an Ethernet pipe and not disrupt the other 100 offices using frame relay. It sounds simple enough, but no one is there yet."