News
Video Services Strain Bandwidth Capacity
By Masha Zager
Apr 12, 2007, 20:07

Inadequate bandwidth is the biggest showstopper for providers who want to deliver reliable triple-play services, according to an audience poll taken during a Web presentation hosted today by analyst firm Infonetics Research. 

Arnold Jansen of Alcatel-Lucent and Scott Shoaf of Juniper Networks, speaking in the webinar, said that network providers face challenges in delivering services – especially video – where quality of service (QoS) issues like latency and availability matter to customers. Consumers don’t mind if a Web site stalls for a moment, but they don’t want TV shows to pause or pixelate.

Adding video to the bundle raises the stakes. As Jansen pointed out, customers who are unhappy with video are likely to cancel the whole bundle, not just the video.

Bandwidth Oversubscribing - A Thing of the Past?

"Don't sell more services  than you can deliver."

Providers are accustomed to offering high-speed Internet service access on a “best efforts” basis, meaning that they make a reasonable effort to provide the bandwidth they advertise. This won't work for video, the speakers agreed. Instead, providers will have to guarantee bandwidth and QoS. No longer will they be able to sell the same bandwidth multiple times and hope that only one customer wants to use it at any given time. “Don’t sell more services than you can deliver,” Jansen warned.

Between high-definition TV (HDTV), video on demand (VoD), and Internet-based video, Jansen expects bandwidth demands to increase by a factor of between 10 and 100 in the near future. He said most network providers would have to upgrade their infrastructure to meet this demand; telecom providers in particular would need VDSL2 or fiber-to-the home to deliver the required levels of service.

Is Adding Network Capacity Enough?

Academic researchers testing applications on ultra-high-speed networks find that QoS issues disappear when there is enough network capacity. However, Jansen said it would not be cost effective to meet increased demand solely by increasing capacity, and providers would need to consider other solutions as well. (Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper both market such solutions.)

Among the approaches the speakers discussed were storing popular content closer to the end user; denying users prime-time access to niche content if it would degrade QoS for others (so much for the “long tail” made possible by IPTV); and assigning different priorities to different services.

In addition, they said, network providers would have to take measures to add security and redundancy to networks, migrate from ATM to the more cost-effective Ethernet protocol, use more intelligent devices at the network edge and install “plug-and-play” networks within the home.

No More "Dumb Pipes"

Juniper’s Shoaf hinted at another reason providers might prefer to guarantee service by means other than increasing network capacity: Maintaining control over access and priorities makes the network more than a “dumb pipe.”

Shoaf pointed out that when network providers invest in their infrastructure to support IPTV and VoD, they aren't the only ones who  benefit – application providers do, too. Rather than ceding these profits to application providers, he said, network providers can sell, or resell, additional services beyond the triple play.

If network providers can guarantee bandwidth and QoS, they have an advantage in marketing high-bandwidth services like gaming, security, off-site storage, business productivity solutions, communication services, and bandwidth-on-demand. Alternatively, they can offer to sell guarantees of bandwidth and QoS to application providers, taking advantage of the competition among those providers to deliver high-quality services to customers.   

But network capacity costs have fallen quickly over the last few years, and they seem likely to continue falling. The technology for managing QoS may not be on the same rapid curve. If network providers count on their QoS monopoly to protect profits, will that leave them vulnerable in a few years to overbuilders with ultra-high-capacity networks that don't require QoS management? The webinar left this question unanswered.