Here Comes the "Fast Lane" from Verizon (Over LTE & Fixed)

Here is how to offer "Fast Lanes" in the Net Neutrality era: call it a private network.

Matt Hamblen reports to Computerworld that "Verizon today introduced an LTE wireless traffic management service to give business and government customers the ability to prioritize critical network-based applications.

..Verizon said it is the first U.S.-based carrier to offer such a service, which it calls Private Network Traffic Management .. The service will work over both LTE wireless and wired communications and will segregate the priority communications from Verizon's public network 

Verizon will offer different service levels, including a "mission critical" class, that a customer could use for video or voice over IP traffic. In that scenario, a customer could decide to prioritize video communications above emails or even lower-priority communications in a machine-to-machine network.

.. Carlos Benavides, associate director of product management, Verizon predicted the biggest use of the private network will be to support Internet of Things buildouts .. there would be three levels of service: Enhanced, Premium and Public Safety" 

See "Some IoT functions would get higher priority than others in a crowded network" - here.

Corsa Adds QoS and Metering to its SDN Solution

Corsa Technology announced ".. new SDN metering and QoS (Quality of Service) capability for its line of performance SDN hardware. Corsa’s SDN implementation of this classic traffic engineering function allows network architects to better manage bandwidth across their network with dynamic, policy-aware metering and QoS. Framed around OpenFlow 1.3 QoS, Corsa performance SDN hardware lets network orchestration dynamically use meters and multiple classes of service to deliver SDN QoS which adjusts and adapts allocation of bandwidth at ultra-granular flow-level.

.. Policy-aware provisioning can be dynamically pushed down to the flexible Corsa SDN hardware to make on-going adjustments to meters and queue assignments. The network can then make immediate, informed queuing and discard decisions under congestion. Real-time performance monitoring automatically returns meter statistics and is checked against policy such as SLAs. For network operators including service providers and ISPs, SDN metering and queuing allows new self-serve features to be offered such as “bandwidth reservation” where users can dynamically schedule and reserve bandwidth via separate class of service and meters. 

Corsa  DP6400

From inception, Corsa has been working on dramatically improving the SDN network architecture by delivering SDN hardware that can easily and quickly scale for very large network applications. Performant and flexible, the DP6400™ product line can be configured to take on any networking function, ranging from Layer 2/3 switching and routing at massive scale, to complex Layer4- 7 aware network elements that allow network orchestration to dynamically adjust data forwarding"
  
See "Corsa Technology Announces SDN Metering and QoS" - here.

[Gartner] Riverbed & Silver Peak are the WAN Optimization Leaders

Riverbed shared with us Gartner's Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization - from a report by Joe Skorupa [pictured], VP Distinguished Analyst and Bjarne Munch, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.

"Most networks carry a variety of traffic types of differing characteristics and importance. Many organizations are striving to manage this traffic to optimize the response times of critical applications and reduce costs, given that bandwidth continues to represent a significant proportion of operating expenditure for wide-area data networks. But the cost of bandwidth isn't the only consideration — as resources are increasingly centralized, minimizing the effect of latency on application response times is becoming a critical requirement. In addition, virtualization and new application environments, such as cloud computing and Web services as well as data replication, can put an unexpected strain on the WAN"

"The development of the application acceleration market has been driven by customer demand for highly integrated solutions that employ a wide range of techniques to optimize network traffic and that offer scalability and fault tolerance. Vendors in this space initially addressed either the traffic shaping/QoS market or the compression/caching market. These two segments have now largely merged, with most products supporting both sets of capabilities. Increasingly, the combination of application visibility/QoS and latency mitigation is required to achieve acceptable application performance. We therefore see a need for application identification/control and both generic and application-specific optimizations to mitigate the impact of network latency on remote application performance"
  

See: "Riverbed Again Recognized As A “Leader” In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for WAN Optimization–Seven Years Running" - here

Verizon: No Internet for you!

DDoS attacks are usually launched against businesses, and many ISPs have some level of detecting and mitigating attacks. It is rare to see a DDoS attack against consumers, and as we can see in the following story, even Verizon has rough times detecting the cause for the QoS degradation felt by the victim's neighbors, and chose a simple solution - cut the service to the victim!

Stop the Cap! reports that "For nearly a month, Verizon FiOS customers in Westborough and Northborough, Mass. have experienced frequent slowdowns and outages of their Internet and telephone service that Verizon now admits have been traced to a denial-of-service attack on a single residential customer in Westborough .. Verizon’s first solution was to replace FiOS routers, which proved ineffective .. Last week, Verizon finally identified the specific customer targeted by the cyber-attack and terminated his FiOS account, which also put an end to the service-disrupting attacks.

"Some customers are wondering whether Verizon has an effective plan to deal with future cyber attacks"

See "Denial of Service Attack on One Mass. Customer Brings Verizon FiOS to Its Knees for Many" - here.

Hitachi: Big Data Analytics Enables QoE, QoS and Monetization

Hitachi Data Systems announced it that  ".. Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) and several telecommunications partners [Brocade, JDSU, SeaChange] will demonstrate the ability of big data applications in telecom to lower network and operations costs, reduce customer churn protecting existing business revenues, and create new revenue streams. World-class quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) is possible only through the integration of a streaming data platform technology for real-time data, and the use of Hadoop and database technologies for batch and online data.

Demos:

• Fine-Grain Analytics for Video Premium Services (With JDSU)

• Carrier-Hosted Analytics – Backhaul Services (With JDSU)
• Virtual Network Platform
• Multiscreen Video Delivery (With SeaChange)

• Brocade Deterministic Networks with Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for Media (With Brocade)

• Hitachi Content Platform and Hitachi Cloud Services
• The Internet of Things and Network Function Virtualization
• RAN-Aware Video Traffic Optimization
• Advanced M2M Network Solution 

See "Hitachi Data Systems to Showcase Leading Network Analytics Technology at Mobile World Congress 2014" - here.

Frontier Adds Traffic Prioritization based on User-defined Applications

Frontier Communications ".. continues to enhance its Ethernet portfolio, now offering traffic prioritization based on user-defined applications. New Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities significantly improve network efficiencies and availability by prioritizing critical applications.

Frontier is introducing two new Ethernet offerings for Retail and Wholesale users:

• Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) Gold focuses on businesses needing point-to-point design within Frontier's QoS-enabled markets, requiring service level agreements (SLAs) surrounding bandwidth guarantees, a limited delay in traffic prioritization and monthly reporting.
   
• Frontier's EVPL Platinum offers premium point-to-point service for customers with real-time data delivery requirements and corresponding SLAs".

See "Frontier Communications Enhances Ethernet Portfolio" - here.

Ericsson Enhances SSR 8000 with Multi-application Card

Ericsson announced the "release of a new multiple-application card that will support various services concurrently without compromising performance. This board in the SSR 8000 family [see "Ericsson Adds DPI and Wi-Fi to SSR 8000"- here and "Ericsson: 22 Contracts for the SSR 8000" - here] is powered by SNP 4000 [see "Ericsson's New Network Processor - for Internal Use Only" - here], a revolutionary processor introduced by Ericsson in March 2013.

New application and service models such as network slicing - driven by the adoption of SDN, virtualization and cloud technologies in the network - require the kind of scale and processing power provided by the SNP 4000, to provide granular and personalized services with tens of millions of traffic flows".

See "Ericsson Smart Services Router gets multi-application card" - here.

Accedian F-FLO Optimizes Wireless Backhaul Network Performance in Real-time

 
Accedian Networks introduced its new " .. solutions group, called Performant Networks; which offers a Wireless-Aware™ SDN product line that optimizes performance in real-time on fixed-wireless networks. This is accomplished by dynamically shaping traffic when link capacity suddenly changes due to real-world conditions such as adverse weather and RF interference.

.. The Solutions Groups’ first product, the R-FLO® solution, is compatible with mixed RF, fiber and copper topologies and complements existing networks by bringing unified high-availability and optimized performance network-wide by using all available links, all the time ̶ including standby and slow segments. Patent-pending link capacity monitoring allows R-FLO to dynamically groom traffic and maintain QoS even when links fade .. the R-FLO solution has proven interoperability with leading radio and networking vendors including: SAF Tehnika®, Cambium Networks ™, Trango Systems® and Radwin®".

See "Accedian Introduces a New Solutions Group – Performant Networks" - here.

Alcatel-Lucent: "third party pays favors content providers with deep pockets"; Needs Strong PCC and DPI

 
A blog post by Rich Crowe [pictured], Marketing Director, Alcatel-Lucent IP Platforms, to the vendor's blog, analyses the 1-800 (Zero rate to the subscriber, 3rd party pays) model in mobile data (see ESPN, Facebook).

"A third party pays plan is fair in that any content provider can subsidize the data its content consumes. This assumes that the net is neutral, meaning that data is treated with equal priority once it is on the mobile internet. In reality, third party pays favors content providers with deep pockets. Less well-funded content providers, smaller operations and start-ups that can’t afford to pay for data could lose traffic and face reduced advertiser support .. Content providers that subsidize large quantities of data will almost certainly seek service-level agreements (SLAs) that ensure a minimum level of quality for their traffic. These SLAs could de-prioritize traffic from other content providers, possibly to the point where providers’ services and brands are negatively affected. Subscribers consuming content that is not subject to an SLA could experience a corresponding service degradation"

"A strong policy control function will be essential for determining which subscriber data is zero-rated and billable to the third party content provider. Proper traffic identification is critical to policy control performance. It calls for deep packet inspection or knowledge that the access network identifier is unique to the third party traffic that is subject to the agreement".

See "Third party pays – Six degrees of mobile data plan innovation" - here. Related post - "[Guest Post]: 1-800 Apps Concept: Superficially Appealing but Unworkable" - here, 

Ascom LTE Testing Selected by Swisscom (CHF1.2M) & 2 US MNOs ($10M)

Ascom Network Testing announced that " .. As part of its nation-wide 4G/LTE rollout program, Swisscom has selected Ascom to provide an upgrade of its existing benchmarking and network quality of service monitoring with a total value of more than CHF 1.2 million. The contract is part of a network overhaul initiated by Swisscom to handle future growth in mobile data transmission"

" .. Ascom’s TEMS Portfolio is used in most of the European countries to do first validation of 4G/LTE network performance and was recently also selected by two leading US operators for 4G/LTE benchmarking and service performance monitoring projects worth more than USD 10 million".

See "Swisscom selects Ascom Network Testing for 4G/LTE-Network Benchmarking" - here.

Survey: 2/3 Interested in a Premium, Enhanced Quality of Service (QoS)

"In February 2013, Alcatel-Lucent asked mobile broadband consumers in six countries about the concept of service level-based data plans. Globally, two-thirds of respondents said they would be interested in a premium service that could provide an enhanced quality of service (QoS) .. Survey analysis showed that the optimal price for a premium subscription is about $10.00 per month (all prices in US dollars). For an application boost, it’s approximately $6.50 per month, about the same as the optimal per-use price for the turbo boost service. The comparatively high turbo boost price may indicate that those interested in this service don’t think they’ll use it frequently but are willing to pay for it in specific instances." 

See also "[Signals Research] Users are Willing to Pay for Personalization" - here.

See "Service level-based plans: Six degrees of mobile data plan innovation", By Rich Crowe, Marketing Director, Alcatel-Lucent IP Platforms - here.

TM Deployments [249]: Mobily [Saudi Arabia] Uses Ericsson SSR 8000

According to Mobily annual report (here), in 2012 "Data traffic on wireless broadband network services grow from 163 to 750 terabyte per day". Probably in order to accommodate this demand to traffic, Mobily has upgraded its core wireless netwrok.

Telecom Lead reports that "Mobily has selected Ericsson to provide Evolved Packet Core networks in the western region of the Kingdom. The Ericsson EPC solution enables Mobily subscribers to have the ability to access and consume four times more data .. As per the agreement, Ericsson will upgrade the EPC network with the Evolved Packet Gateway based on the SSR 8000 family to support LTE and prepare the network for Voice over LTE .. The enhanced capacity of the network will allow Mobily mobile customers to use and consume bandwidth-hungry applications and services while maintaining high quality of experience for all users".

Is Mobily going to use DPI to manage those "bandwidth-hungry applications" ? Two years ago I reported that Mobily is using Bridgewater's (now Amdocs) PCRF with Cisco's SCE DPI devices for its 3G network (here). However, the Ericsson SSR 8000 has its own DPI (see "Ericsson Adds DPI and Wi-Fi to SSR 8000" - here).

Nasser Al Nasser, COO, Mobily, said: “To provide our customers with an unparalleled mobile-broadband experience, we constantly look for ways to efficiently maintain and increase network availability and enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) to support LTE”

See "Mobily selects Ericsson for packet core networks" - here.

Survey: "mobile broadband quality is a key deciding factor in their choice of operator"

A recent survey by Nokia Siemens Networks finds that the "The number of people likely to switch mobile operators is now 39% globally and has jumped by more than 20% in one year .. the study underscores the importance of both Internet quality, which has become a deciding factor in the choice of operators in mature markets, and voice quality, which is key in other markets".

NSN surveys "8,700 interviews of customers in mature markets (Denmark, South Korea, Japan, UK and US), in-transition markets (Brazil, Colombia and Russia) and emerging markets (India) during the second half of 2012". 

"..The impact of smart devices on usage was most pronounced in mature markets, where two out of three people are now active users of advanced data services. For these customers, mobile broadband quality is a key deciding factor in their choice of operator. Voice quality remains the chief consideration in emerging and in-transition markets".

See "Mobile operators: keep your customers loyal by focusing on voice, data quality" - here. 

[Geddes Consulting]: Why you can't sell QoS?

 
Interesting article for all vendors pitching QoS/QoE-based tiered services,by Martin Geddes (pictured).

The article promotes Predictable Network Solutions, a "research consultants that have created a quantitative mathematical understanding of end-to-end network Quality of Service (QoS)We use that understanding to educate and advise developers, builders and managers in the construction of networks and distributed systems so that predictable application performance can be delivered to end-users". The introduction follows, read the rest - here.

"Network operators have long wanted to be able to sell quality-of-service (QoS) network capabilities to either end users or third party application providers. However, each attempt to do so on Internet Protocol networks has failed to gain market adoption. There are good reasons for this, but they are subtle, and don’t match the common prejudices against creating multiple classes of service.

This newsletter explores the six core problems with the standard approach to QoS:

• Too weak a proxy for user outcomes.
• Obsessed with real-time flows.
• Misallocates resources.
• Opens a new denial of service attack route.
• “Quality inversion” removes the economic incentive to pay.
• Too limited in the scope of the trades available.

There is an alternative way of managing network resources that cures all these issues. A short summary of how to achieve this is at the end"

HGI Defines IPv6 QoS Standard for Home Gateway; Considers OTT

HGI published an "updated specification for improving Quality of Service (QoS) through the Home Gateway. 'Home Gateway QoS Module Requirements' (here, below) addresses the current evolution of the  home network to an IPv6 environment, and identifies the Home Gateway requirements needed to extend the HGI service-class oriented QoS approach to include IPv6 .. The document is applicable to IPv4 and IPv6 networks on both the WAN and LAN sides of the Home Gateway". 

"The strategy of using the Home Gateway as a key QoS enforcement point allows the service provider to designate service classes and their treatment based on a rich set of classification criteria, including the IPv4 and IPv6 headers. It takes a real-world approach that considers the actual QoS problems in various broadband scenarios, considering not just value-added services but also OTT services [page 13], and other traffic types".

See "HGI Sets the Standard with new QoS Document for the Home Gateway" - here.

How to Build DPI Products? (Part XXI - Dynamic Bandwidth Management in IEEE 802.11)

Paper by Cheikh Sarr, Sofiane Khalfallah and Isabelle Gu´erin-Lassous (pictured).

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new protocol named DRBT (Dynamic Regulation of Best Effort Traffic) which supports QoS throughput guarantees and provides a distributed regulation mechanism for Best Effort traffic in multihop wireless networks.
 

By adapting dynamically the rate of Best Effort traffic at the link layer, DRBT increases the acceptance ratio of QoS flows and provides a good use of the remaining resources through the network. Our protocol also provides an accurate method to evaluate the available bandwidth in IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks which is able to differentiate QoS applications from Best Effort traffic. Through extensive simulations, we compare the performance of our proposal scheme with some others protocols like QPART for instance.

See "Dynamic Bandwidth Management in IEEE 802.11-Based Multihop Wireless Networks" - here. 

IETF Draft: Device-based Real-time Video QoE Improvement

A new IETF draft by Bhumip Khasnabish (pictured) and Gerard Fernando both from ZTE (US) suggest how to improve video QoE without network intervention.  

Abstract 

"This draft describes a method for improving the quality of experience (QoE) for real-time video and other multimedia services using features and functions of the end-point only, that is, without requiring any upgrade to the network transport infrastructure. Any upgrade to the network transport infrastructure not only incurs significant costs, these are also time consuming and technology- dependent. Therefore, these QoE improvement mechanisms are significantly more attractive to both network operators and service providers".

"This document defines a common set of QoE parameters that are applicable for HTTP, Websocket or RTP sessions .. In order to improve quality it is common practice to focus on improving network infrastructure (bandwidth increase, etc.). However, our proposal enables improvements in quality by utilizing transport independent QoE management".

See "End-point based Multimedia QoE Management" - here.

Syria - Research on DPI

This year we have seen many stories about the use of DPI in Syria (which I haven"t covered in the blog). However, it seems that researchers from the University of Damascus are also working on DPI, in its more commercial apsect of traffic shpaping and QoS.

Eng. Asaad Jamous, Dr. Nawar Al-awa and Dr. Maher Suleiman published a paper last year on the subject.

Abstract

This research aims to study signature-based network traffic shaping systems, to manage the bandwidth of network link among different packets of applications according to the priority and importance per application , and building QoS classes.

In this research, we investigate the different methods of packets classifications, string matching  algorithm, regular expression, traffic shaping algorithms and techniques. A generic model to match the application signatures was developed, and integrated with QoS.

The system components implemented at Linux operating system using th e open sources units and programs. Experiments of the effects of various metrics and their overall performance have been undertaken and evaluated, and the limitations found in the study are also discussed.

See "Signature-based network traffic shaping" - here.

[Ericsson] OSS/BSS in 2013: OTT Partnership, Tiered Services, Analytics and Bill Shock

 
Beau Atwater, Director of marketing strategy for Ericsson (previously from Telcordia, pictured), outlines the main reasons for CSPs to spend money on OSS/BSS systems upgrades in 2013 ("part evolution, part revolution"). As we have seen these vendor wishes many times before, I can only join Beau's statement "The more things change, the more they stay the same" - in selling side pitches and predictions.

• In 2013, consumers will continue to flock to over-the-top (OTT) voice, video and data services. What’s changing is that instead of sleepless nights pondering a future as a dumb pipe, CSPs will start turning OTT from a problem into an opportunity .. In 2013, many CSPs will partner with OTT players. For example, a mobile operator could provide a certain amount of bandwidth and prioritization to a video OTT provider that agrees to share revenue because the QoS would help differentiate its service. The video OTT provider’s brand also could help the mobile operator attract customers. Both companies also could market to each other’s customer base. CSPs will have to optimize their OSS/BSS infrastructure to execute this
   
• "OSS/BSS overhauls also will enable the trend toward tiered pricing, which will take off in 2013
   
• CSPs will spend more and more time analyzing customer behavior so they can capitalize on it
   
• Finally, 2013 also will be the year that CSPs began to turn another problem into an opportunity: bill shock. CSPs suffer financially when surprised customers become former customers or share their anguish with their social networks. CSPs also bear the cost of fielding all those billing inquiries. See "24 Operator Groups (4B Subscribers) to Adopt Bill Shock Prevention Measures This Year" - here, "Bill Shock Prevention is Coming to the US Mobile Service" - here and "EU Helps Preventing Mobile Bill Shock" - here. 

See "The OSS/BSS-enabled revolution begins in 2013" - here.

PCRF Deployments [212]: Network Norway Tries Every Possible Use-case w/Tango Telecom

Tango Telecom announced the ".. successful trial deployment of its cloud-based Policy Control solution with Network Norway"

Tor Anders Braun, Head of Services and Core Network, Network Norway said: “We chose Tango Telecom for this cloud-based trial because of the comprehensive nature of their product and the large number of use cases supported including sophisticated app-based self-care as well as QoS management, Turbo Boost and advanced Data Plan and Bundle management. They have proven to be a fast, flexible and capable supplier and we are very pleased with the speed with which they integrated with our other network elements and demonstrated a very impressive end to end solution”.

Network Norway is part of the Tele2 Group, with 1.2M subscribers in Norway. See also - "Networks Norway Uses Flash Networks for Video Optimization" - here.

See "Tango Telecom enables Leading Norwegian Operator to support Policy in the Cloud" - here.