Zeugma Publishes Broadband Survey

Zeugma published the results of an IDC survey of U.S. 787 consumers that was conducted in August 2008. The survey produced the following conclusions:

On Premium Bandwidth Services:

• 94 percent of respondents saw value in broadband services that dynamically allocate premium bandwidth for certain types of traffic, such as video, VOIP, gaming, and telecommuter VPNs.
• 54 percent would actively seek to change service providers if another offered this service; 26 percent would be willing to pay additional fees for premium bandwidth services.

On Bandwidth Capping and Metering

• 81 percent do not like the idea of establishing a bandwidth cap and charging for use above the cap.
• 51 percent would try to change service providers if their provider imposed bandwidth caps. Interestingly, light and moderate users are even more opposed to capping and metering than are heavy users.
• 83 percent either do not know what a gigabyte is or have no idea how many they use.
• Only 5 percent said unequivocally that “those who use more should pay more

There is a growing gap between the broadband providers and their customers. The Telcos and the cable companies look at the issue from their perspective and are trying to limit traffic growth by punishing power users. This is bad business and policy. Why alienate your best customers?

There is a hidden agenda here. While these caps will not affect many data users, they significantly limit the amount of TV content that can be delivered over the top. The Telcos and cable companies want people to use their own TV services rather than viewing over the top content. This will become a major issue when it becomes apparent to people who want to watch Netflix or CinemaNow content regularly on their TV.

Alcatel-Lucent Improves IPTV Network Architecture

Alcatel-Lucent announced improvements to its Triple Play Service Delivery Architecture (TPSDA) that includes:

• Increased capacity and density
• Policy enforcement with per-subscriber resolution
• The equivalent of 19.2 million queues per telecom rack, which enables more fine-grain service control to ensure each service is delivered with the appropriate Quality of Experience (QoE) and uses network resources in the most efficient manner
• PPPoE termination, which facilitates the smooth migration of legacy networks to TPSDA
• A reporting and analysis system which provides tools to warehouse, aggregate and process per subscriber application-level statistics

Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA has been successful and fifty service providers globally have adopted it along with Alcatel-Lucent products, including AT&T in the U.S. TPSDA is providing more granular control over flows in order to assure QoE. Zeugma is attacking the same problem with its new system.

These architectures will clearly be important for insuring QoE for VoIP and mobile services. It is still not clear to me that it will be effective for IPTV traffic as IPTV moves from a broadcast/multicast approach to an on demand/unicast approach. Unicast TV will saturate these networks and be quite difficult to manage using packet based techniques.

Zeugma Introduces Service Delivery Router

Zeugma, a Vancouver based start up, has introduced a service delivery router that combines deep packet inspection with the ability to support applications in a single box. Its objective is to support the deployment of value added services over broadband networks including managed Telco IPTV services and unmanaged over the top Internet TV and video.

Zeugma's market research indicates that more than 75 percent of the people surveyed are interested in buying or renting movies over the Internet. This research also indicates that people are not willing to pay much to begin watching the movie in a few minutes rather than waiting to download the entire movie first. While more than 55 percent would pay an extra $.25, only 40 percent would pay an extra $1.00 for a more immediate experience. On the other hand, more than 60 percent would be willing to watch a 30 second ad for the more immediate service. Zeugma stated that this shows that improved QoS can increase revenues.

The company states that its product's application awareness facilitates the classification of traffic. Its bandwidth manager can allocate or deny resources. It manages QoS and bandwidth on a per subscriber and per flow basis.

Zeugma's system is under evaluation at several major carriers including at BT.

Service management is clearly an important issue for broadband service providers. I don't think that best efforts will be adequate as the number and importance of these services increase.

However, the difficulties of managing video, especially Telco IPTV video should not be underestimated. We published a report Networking Strategies for TelcoTV Services that examines these issues in detail. You can request a free white paper on this subject.

Our conclusion was that as video on demand, replay TV, and other unicast forms of content from managed IPTV services will overwhelm broadband networks with video traffic. We half jokingly state that QoS will not work in this environment because there will not be enough low priority packets to discard.

While the effectiveness of the Zeugma and other similar system may be questionable for video traffic, especially for managed services, I think that they will be key for other services, especially for VoIP. I expect that they will be important on 4G mobile networks where all services, including voice, will be delivered over packet networks.