Broadband Ip Networks

Putting Broadband to work

Broadband value added services create value and loyalty, thus revenue.

Abstract

Broadband carriers, access, and service providers initially focused on providing Internet Access. As competition and price pressure intensify, Providers are seeking to deploy IP-based value added services. Rapid Industry adoption of rich streaming media is being driven by an eco system of interested parties: Service providers, Advertisers, Broadcasters, Consumers and Carriers. This rapid conversion needs a new platform to manage, store, protect and distribute Broadband Content of all types (Games, Video, Music and Business Applications)

This document describes the needs and the solution for such a platform, empowering the new breed of horizontally layered providers of services. RAGA's platform was developed to uniquely address these concerns and offer and end-to-end solution for Broadband Content Delivery.

We regard Broadband as a powerful technology, potentially a "Killer App", because it can change and redefine our lifestyle, reshaping infotainment and the way we use our leisure. Broadband is a new infrastructure for numerous Infotainment services not possible before. It enables a Content Revolution in Entertainment (especially Music, Video and Games), education, Productivity and Communication.

During the last two years, the industry seems to understand this trend, and traditionally well-defined borders between separate types of operators seem to now blend. The Telecommunications Market is undergoing a vast convergence process. Different industries, having served in the past different sectors in the market, have now contributed, mostly thanks to technological advances, to the formation of the "Information Society", where the general public accesses incommensurable quantities of all types of content and media:

Basic requirements to deliver Broadband Content

To fully realize the potential of a public network delivering Broadband On-Demand content to a 'segment of one' user, Service intelligence is needed in the network, across all applications. To get a coherent and repetitive intelligence across many applications, the best solution is to host them on a single Middleware or Platform (which is what the RAGA™ framework is all about), which applies the intelligence to all content and applications. The service intelligence needs to ask each user:

Who are you?

What applications do you want to use?

Are you allowed to use it?

What class of service do you require?

How much are you willing to pay for that service?

The platform must then dynamically apply the necessary combination of security, performance, address management, and protocol functions. This user-oriented, session-aware service model requires that the platform support the following service intelligence functions:

User Authentication and Authorization -for secure access control

Security - to ensure privacy and to protect content

CoS and QoS for tiered services and integration data, voice and video

Address management - for guaranteed connection of the right content to the right user

Accounting - fine-grained for usage-based billing

Customer Network management - self provisioning and management

Content Delivery management - by multiple content providers themselves

Trouble shooting - end-to-end from the content provider, through the network, to the subscriber terminal

All these functions reside in the middleware layer connected to each and very user-application (Video-on-demand, Interactive Games, etc.) to provide a common interface for a simple, friendly and coherent user experience. Here is how the RAGA™ platfom logical design applies the layered approach:

At the end of the day, what we really need to deliver is the quality we take for granted in today's PSTN, namely the 'ten commandments' of uninterrupted service: Availability, Affordability, Services, Security, Scalability, Simplicity, Connectivity, Performance, Flexibility, Ubiquity.

And because new IP services appear and evolve so rapidly, we need to do all that in a manner that minimizes time to market. A new service should be integrated, tested and be ready to launch in a matter of days, not months.

Another way to look at it is to realize we are providing LAN features over WAN. This makes the public network into an "Intranet" for the authenticated subscribers. Once authenticated by their IP address and password, the subscribers get fast access to Broadband Content as if it was installed on their LAN. Their 'IT department' is the access provider, assuring trouble free availability of the service.

Who is the customer? Identifying business models.

Both content providers and consumers derive benefits from the content distribution. Consumers get high-quality full-screen video, games, Entertainment, and software. Content Providers get access to the mass of subscribers, in what is actually a new distribution channel. It makes sense to derive revenues from each of these users. The network operator may offer his services to multiple content providers, providing them with contracted storage space, access to it's backbone to distribute content, security and subscriber management. This warrants a fee.

As an example,