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Tag: networks

  • VoIP Biggest Victim of IT Managers' Hesitance to Deploy Next-Generation Apps


    VoIP is the most likely application type to have deployments delayed due to third-party network concerns, according to a survey of IT managers.

    The report by Apparent Networks found that 73 per cent of respondents also said VoIP was the most common application to stress their networks.

    Of the IT managers surveyed who said they delayed an application deployment (36 per cent), 61 per cent said they had delayed a VoIP application.

    Unified communications and video delivery applications were the next two most commonly cited for delays in deployment.

    Jim Melvin, Apparent Network’s president and Chief Marketing Officer, said the report, The State of the Path, provides an interesting insight into the issues causing network managers to delay their deployment of next-generation applications.

    Writing on the Apparent Networks blog he said the survey, which targeted hundreds of network managers, found that network concerns outside of managers’ control are slowing application deployments, especially for VoIP and Unified Communications.

    "Apparent understands that network managers are completely on board with these next-generation technologies, but they are not confident enough in the third-party network performance necessary to make these technologies meet their performance requirements," he said.

  • GENBAND and BroadSoft Offer Legacy Switch Migration Solution


    VoIP applications provider Broadsoft and IP infrastructure solutions developer GENBAND have announced a new set of solutions that enable carriers to upgrade their networks while supporting legacy features.

    The two companies have integrated GENBAND’s gateways with BroadSoft’s suite of hosted telephony and multimedia applications.

    Carrier demand to migrate aging TDM switches and expand broadband voice services is behind the move, according to the two companies.

    They have coupled BroadSoft’s BroadWorks VoIP application platform with GENBAND G9 and G6 gateways and C3 Signaling Controller, as well as the S3 Session Border Controller (SBC).

    David Bukovsky, vice president of products for BroadSoft, said the combined solution offers affordable switch migration that extends beyond legacy functionality, delivering new sources of revenue.

    "Previously, switch replacement meant new expenditures without new services," he said.

    "Unlike other offerings, the GENBAND/BroadSoft solution allows carriers to deliver carrier grade legacy Class 4, Class 5 and voice over broadband services via a single system.

    "Our combined solution enables carriers to reduce operational costs, but more importantly, gain a host of new services for the subscriber base."

    Bukovsky said these new services — such as fixed-mobile integration, hosted unified communications and Web 2.0 integration — improve customer retention and provide new sources of revenue that were previously unavailable.

    When the GENBAND/BroadSoft solution is deployed for TDM switch replacement, carriers can implement a complete next generation voice over broadband network via one integrated platform, including:

    • Residential Broadband — delivering primary-line services to residential consumers and home offices over any broadband or legacy connection, including GR-303, V5.2 and TR-08
    • Business Connectivity — connecting legacy Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), such as IP PBX, PBX or Key Telephone Systems, to the PSTN over any form of IP connectivity
    • Hosted PBX— delivering a complete suite of enhanced PBX functionality over any IP connection
    • IP Peering and Transport — lowering total cost of operation and increasing network efficiency and operational simplicity

  • WiMAX MENA: Roll-Out Strategy Key To WiMAX v LTE Debate


    Arguing that WiMAX is a better wireless 4G system than Long Term Evolution (LTE) – or vice versa – is a waste of time.

    That’s the view of Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International, who is adamant that it’s pointless claiming either side in the 4G debate is superior to the other.

    "I would violently fight against those that say LTE is better than WiMAX," he said. "This is absolutely wrong.

    Even so, Petry, who is a speaker at this week’s WiMAX Forum Mena in Dubai, said that a key question in the WiMAX community is how it compares to other wireless technologies.

    He is addressing this in his presentation to the conference, which is entitled: Exploring The Capabilities Of Potential 4G Candidates And Understanding The Best Parameters For Benchmarking And A Successful Rollout.

    As part of this, Petry will "clarify the landscape" – essentially spelling out what makes a technology 2G, 3G or 4G.

    He told smartphone.biz-news this is necessary because many people are confused by what a technology has to offer before it can be classed as 4G.

    "There is a lot of confusion in the market," he said. "A lot of protagonists are confusing people with conflicting messages."

    "For 4G there are very clear pre-requisites and without them being implemented in the technology, you can not claim it is 4G."

    Dr Hans-Peter Petry, head of radio access and transport at Detecon International

    So WiMAX partly belongs to 3G – along with LTE and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) – and only in certain circumstances can they claim to be 4G, according to Petry.

    He said Detecon had defined a metric that enabled each of the technologies to be evaluated in a fair way.

    This included: marketing, geography, services, tariffs, and technology inputs.

    "All these parameters are important for an evaluation," he said. "We have mapped these into a single Service Production Cost (SPC)."

    So it is possible to show the SPC for individual technologies under similar conditions.

    Petry said this has produced some "astonishing results", the outcome of which shows that the decision on which 4G technology to implement is not a question of the technology.

    "Under the same boundary conditions, the difference in the technology is minor."

    Where there are differences, according to Petry, they lie in the roll-out strategies.

    He said this came down to whether an operator is looking for coverage first, then capacity or vice versa.

    "The recommendation is that before you talk about the technology, talk about other things such as roll-out strategy," he said.

    So factors such as the kind of customer, whether the area is green field, brown field, rural or densely populated, all have to be considered.

    Petry said boundary questions then had to be dealt with before, finally, talking about the appropriate technology.

    "Then you can choose the right technology," he said. "Do not choose WiMAX because you think it is better than LTE."

    As a footnote, Petry said he believed LTE would ultimately capture a larger market share than WiMAX.

    That may prove correct, but as the performance and capabilities of WiMAX and LTE get better over time, the competition between them will become less important than that between wireless and wired broadband.

  • VoIP Equipment Sales Plummet, IMS Revenues Grow


    VoIP equipment purchases are decreasing at the expense of spending on the deployment of IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) technology, according to Infonetics Research.

    Worldwide sales of IMS equipment, including HSS (home subscriber servers), CSCF servers, and voice application servers, are forecast to jump 74 per cent in 2009 over 2008.

    However, worldwide VoIP revenue in Q1 totaled USD $600.4 million, down 33 per cent from the first quarter of 2008 – the sharpest quarterly decline ever.

    Diane Myers, directing analyst, Service Provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, said no product segment or region was immune to declines in the service provider VoIP equipment market.

    Diane Myers, Infonetics Research

    Most large Tier 1 service providers are coming to the end of major VoIP projects and most ILECs and PTTs have put PSTN migration plans on hold.

    She said the service provider VoIP equipment market had a "rough" first quarter, declining 29 per cent sequentially in worldwide revenue. "The market pause for VoIP equipment is being exacerbated by the global economic downturn as service providers put VoIP equipment purchases on hold," she said.

    "We are beginning to see a noticeable shift in spending from stand-alone VoIP networks to IMS deployments."

    Myers said that while the core IMS equipment segments, CSCF and HSS, are still small compared to the service provider VoIP market, deployments remain strong in EMEA and Asia Pacific.

    Infonetics’ IMS Deployment Tracker shows Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens, and Huawei leading the way with core IMS equipment.

    "The core IMS equipment market had an impressive quarter with $63.7 million in revenue," she added.

  • Hosted VoIP Solutions Provider Aptela Works with ClearSight to Resolve Network Issues


    Hosted VoIP solutions provider Aptela has announced that its working with ClearSight Networks’ Network Time Machine (NTM) to diagnose problems on customer and carrier networks.

    Matt Smith, vice president of technology and client services at Aptela, said the solution allows them to quickly and easily maintain network uptime and stave off unexpected outages.

    Since Aptela works with so many customer and carrier networks in addition to its own network, it used to be nearly impossible to pinpoint specific issues and their origins.

    He said NTM works like a metal detector for finding needle-in-a-haystack problems across all points within the network.

    "Now, with ClearSight’s NTM, we can take retroactive network data, pull up metrics on any call, and identify the source of the problem.

    "We are able to resolve issues and performance bottlenecks for our customers and carriers faster, more accurately and with less overhead."

    As a hosted-PBX and VoIP service provider, Aptela routes customers’ voice and data traffic via the Internet.

    For SMBs with limited IT resources and budgets, this method provides the benefits of a scalable and powerful VoIP system without the associated price tag.

    However, it also means that Aptela does not have visibility into the network hardware at each customer location. Smith said that using ClearSight’s NTM and pre-established metrics, the company now has greater insight and better visibility into any VoIP call, fax, email or phone registration over the network—and may quickly identify possible causes of latency, jitter and other call quality problems.

    Hosted VoIP services are on a strong growth trajectory, with a recent Infonetics Research report showing that the VoIP services market grew 33 per cent to USD $30.8 billion in 2008.

  • Meru Unveils Video-Over-Wireless Infrastructure


    Meru Networks has introduced what it says is the first wireless LAN solution optimised for delivering high-quality video over the new generation of IEEE 802.11n networks.

    The company’s Video Services Module (ViSM) is designed to address video-delivery issues specific to 802.11n networks – which are susceptible to unpredictable loss rates that can negatively impact video quality.

    The module applies application-aware optimisation techniques to web streaming and real-time multicast video, underlying technologies that enable a broad array of video applications, from wireless projection, IPTV and event simulcast to videoconferencing, telepresence and video surveillance.

    Vaduvur Bharghavan, Meru’s chief technology officer, said video-based applications are becoming pervasive in schools, health-care institutions and other enterprises because they boost productivity significantly for a relatively low cost.

    But he said high-definition video delivery over wireless is especially challenging because it combines the high bandwidth requirements of heavy data traffic with the delay sensitivity and loss characteristics of voice traffic.

    Vaduvur Bharghavan, Meru’s chief technology officer

    "And while 802.11n dramatically increases available bandwidth, it also increases per-transmission error rates," he said.

    "For multicast applications this translates to lost portions of video; for web video streaming it can mean stalled video or the loss of voice-video synchronization."

    Bharghavan said the power of the ViSM lies in its unique virtualized WLAN architecture, which gives every client device its own dedicated wireless ‘port’.

    "With Meru’s Virtual Port, each client gets its own copy of the multicast application traffic, delivered at the highest possible data rate and unaffected by the transmission or power-save behaviour of other clients," he said.

    "In other vendors’ legacy micro-cell solutions, which force all clients to share the same wireless resource, some clients will always suffer in terms of the timely delivery of multicast frames when other clients require buffering of traffic, thus causing multicast video delays for every client."

    The ViSModule works by using several mechanisms to deliver video traffic based on application and user characteristics.
    The company says this allows scaling to large numbers of concurrent video sessions without appreciably degrading user experience.

    • Application-aware prioritization: synchronises the voice and video components of a video stream, adapting the delivery of each frame based on its importance to the application. Higher-priority MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 marked frames are transmitted with greater assurance of reliability and timeliness.
    • User- and role-based policy enforcement: provides granular control over application behaviour (e.g., a teacher can be assigned higher priority than a student).
    • Seamless video-optimised handoff: proactively reroutes the multicast delivery tree to prevent lost video frames during a transition between access points, and ensures zero-loss for mobile video.
    • Multicast group management: optimises delivery to only those virtual ports whose clients are members of the multicast group, reducing network waste both wirelessly and on the wired network.
    • Graphical visualisation: reveals which clients are running which applications (data, voice, video) to aid in monitoring network-wide application performance.

    ViSM is available in June as an add-on module to Meru’s System Director software. For a network with 100 wireless access points, the module is priced at USD $7,995.

  • Celeno Technology Enables Multiple HDTV Streams Around Home


    Technology that delivers multiple HDTV streams from PCs to TVs and other electronic devices around the home could be launched by the summer.

    Israeli-based Celeno Communications is field-testing in-home WiFi networks with backing from Cisco.

    Celeno, which manufactures semiconductors for multimedia WiFi home networking applications, has created technology that upgrades the transmission portion of the WiFi network but works with existing receivers such as set-top boxes.

    The company says the product is almost ready for commercial deployment and would be built into broadband access gateways.

    Celeno’s OptimizAIR technology uses 5 GHz spectrum, not the 2.4 GHz spectrum used in current WiFi data networks.

    It uses standard PHY and MAC layers but adds proprietary algorithms that the company says can double the throughput of standard 802.11 WiFi and increase the range of the signals by as much as eight times.

    Technology additions include Spatial Channel Awareness and Beam-Forming MIMO (multiple inputs, multiple outputs).

    The company said it can stream HD video 120 feet, through four brick walls and more than three floors.