100G: Amazing Race in Telecom Sector

With capacity on core service provider networks doubling nearly every 12 to 18 months, the industry’s latest obsession is the evolution to 100G networks. There seem to be weekly announcements from service providers, vendors, components suppliers and industry consortiums on something related to 100G, ranging from tests to standards updates.
So the obvious assumption is that the first commercial deployment for 100G will be in the core network of AT&T, Verizon or another major service provider. That’s certainly a safe bet and likely scenario.

But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the first commercial traffic to flow over a 100G wavelength isn’t a bunch of IPTV channels or Hulu videos headed to a consumer’s home, but rather computer-assisted high-energy physics models shuttled between researchers in the United States and Europe. Or maybe it will be an algorithmic trade between a hedge fund and a stock exchange on Wall Street that is triggered by a long-range forecast in Brazil that calls for unusually heavy rainfall amounts.

It sounds counterintuitive that an enterprise or research organization would be the first to deploy a live 100G link, but it makes sense since the demand is already there.
On the research and education side, Caltech moved 1.02 petabytes of data between storage systems over a single 100G wavelength in 12 hours at a supercomputing event last fall – that’s roughly equivalent to 125,000 full-length DVDs! For Caltech and its research partners, that is critical since collaborations such as the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are pumping out petabytes of experiment data that need to be processed and distributed over a global grid of 150 computing and storage facilities to be analyzed by thousands of researchers. The speed of research is directly tied to the network connecting that global grid.

Or on Wall Street, where the rush to reduce latency is moving past the early adopters of quant and hedge funds to more traditional asset managers. And with some exchanges doing in excess of 130 trades per millisecond and some expecting to be pushing out a terabit of data per second in the next year, the need for 100G is obvious. Market prices may be going up or down, but trading volume is headed in only one direction – up.

In fact, supercomputing clusters, electronic trading networks and long-haul research networks were early adopters for 10G and have already dabbled in 40G, so the leap to 100G for them is clear. They have the capacity needs, technical expertise, budgets and can often move faster because these are smaller, private networks needing fewer nodes – at least when compared to a service provider’s core network.

True 100G on a single wavelength is coming, with industry standards expected in 2010 and broader commercial deployments to follow as costs come down. But don’t be surprised if before your latest video on demand purchase rides over a 100G wavelength to your TV in the next year or two that some asset manager for a mutual fund you own might make a trade over a 100G connection first.

So, who do you think will be the first to deploy 100G in a production environment? Please comment because inquiring minds want to know.

Skype, could turn telecom on its ear

Skype is getting a ton of attention for a couple of reasons.

First, it's the latest venture by the two guys — Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis — who created and launched Kazaa. That file-sharing software, notorious for aiding and abetting massive music piracy, is the most downloaded program in history — going on 320 million copies. So you know that anything the founders do is going to be closely watched. It's like awaiting Outkast's next act after Hey Ya!

Second is the disruptive technology thing. Some industry watchers think Skype or something like it could eviscerate all the world's phone companies.
Skype is a way to make high-quality voice calls over the Internet for free. There are already lots of ways to do voice conversations over the Net — the ubiquitous AOL Instant Messenger even does that. The key for Skype, though, is the quality, which on a good broadband connection can sound like a CD of the incoming caller's voice.

A beta version was launched nearly a year ago. Skype recently said that the free software has been downloaded about 10 million times.

To the user, Skype works a lot like instant messaging. On your screen, you see a box that lists which buddies — fellow Skype users — are also on the system. To make a connection, both you and the other person have to have the Skype software and be logged in at the same time. Then you click and make a call, talking either through a headset or using the PC's microphone and speakers. You can't call to a traditional phone.

That's what Skype is. More interesting is what it's not. Skype is not a company in any 20th-century sense of the word. It's an entity that could only happen in this era of the Internet and globalization.

Skype has barely any staff and has no real headquarters. It has no infrastructure whatsoever but is serving millions in 170 countries and could, with the same lack of infrastructure, scale that up to billions. It doesn't seem to have a PR department, either: I couldn't get hold of anyone who could put me in touch with Zennstrom and Friis.

The software comes out of Estonia from people who sort of work for Skype and sort of don't. Skype's offices, if you can call them that, are peppered around Europe while it sets up a nominally central office in London. Meanwhile, Skype just got $9 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, based in California's Silicon Valley, and has signed partnerships with Germany's Siemens and Plantronics of Santa Cruz, Calif.

Zennstrom is from Sweden; Friis from Denmark. The two met while working in Amsterdam for a Swedish telecom company, Tele2. While there, they contracted with the Estonian programmers for a project.

In 1999, Zennstrom and Friis left Tele2 to start Kazaa. They again hired the Estonians, this time to write Kazaa's software. By 2001, Kazaa was a phenomenon. Various government and music industry entities have since tried to shut it down and sue Zennstrom and Friis. To protect themselves, Zennstrom and Friis shuffled Kazaa off to other ownership based in Vanuatu, an island nation near Australia known for a popular cultural activity called land diving, which pretty much involves diving off towers over dry land.

Kazaa works by using the Internet and each user's computer as the infrastructure. When logged on, the users' computers act as a worldwide directory of files and users, and they help connect Kazaa users to each other. Kazaa has no central computer, no fiber-optic lines, no 800 number for technical support, nothing.

Zennstrom and Friis recognized that the technology behind Kazaa could be used in other ways. They brainstormed and decided that the best opportunity was to use it for voice calls. The Estonians again got tapped to write the code.

This time, though, Zennstrom and Friis set out to create a legitimate business, though one that is as hard to touch as a late-morning fog.

Sometimes Skype does business in Tallinn, Estonia; sometimes in Luxembourg, Stockholm or London. Because Skype technology works much like Kazaa, the company's hard assets are little more than a Web site. It's a phone company with no network, no switches, no repair guys in trucks. The users, the users' computers and the public Internet do all the work.
It costs almost nothing — one-tenth of a cent — for Skype to add a new customer. Skype is almost like running a cookie company by just sending out recipes.

Can this strange new business become a blockbuster? Will it undercut and undo the world's phone companies? Tim Draper, partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, believes Skype will have the impact of his biggest hit company, Hotmail, which changed e-mail into a free service. Telecom investor and pundit Peter Cochrane says, "I think it would be foolish of any telco to dismiss (voice over Internet), and especially Skype."

Others aren't so sure. "Skype will remain a niche player, remembered more for the disruptive idea than for the actual business they take from the major phone companies," says telecom market analyst Jeff Kagan.

Or maybe, decades from now, it will be remembered for a different disruptive idea. As Sloan developed the corporate structure for his century, Skype's house of bits and fog might set the tone for this one.

VOIP

Introduction
One of the main driving factors for deploying Voice over IP (VoIP) networks isthe cost benefit associated with doing so.This chapter introduces the reader tothis concept and the Cisco IP Telephony solution.The chapter presents examplesof cost justification and some return on investment (ROI) scenarios.In this chapter you will also be introduced to some exciting advanced VoIPfeatures such as Web integration,multimedia integration,and telephony applica-tion programming interfaces (TAPI).
Introduction to Voice Over IP

Welcome to the new world of packetized voice! Although the idea of packetizedvoice might not be new,we now have the integrated solutions to make ithappen.This text provides you with a thorough understanding of Cisco’s currentvoice solutions,with an emphasis on current! The VoIP industry is a rapidlyevolving one,perhaps changing even faster than the Internet.Keep this guide as areference for voice integration possibilities,but always keep abreast of the latesttechnologies.What is hot today will be commonplace tomorrow.The objectives for this chapter are to:Establish the basic differences between circuit-switched and packet-switched networks.Build a needs and cost justification for toll-bypass solutions.Explore the opportunities for replacing the traditional private branchexchange (PBX) with the Cisco IP Telephony system.Review software integration possibilities such as TAPI integration.Understand the link layer VoIP technologies such as voice over FrameRelay (VoFR) and voice over asynchronous transfer mode (VoATM).Scattered throughout this chapter are several diagrams of network design con-cepts.Later in this book we delve into much greater detail regarding specificequipment and configuration issues.This first chapter focuses on the opportuni-ties that arise from moving to a packetized voice architecture.Along with man-agement and maintenance enhancements,we look at the all-important dollar.Most companies have spent exorbitant amounts of money to install andmaintain their PBXs.Packetizing voice allows for tremendous cost savings nowand in the future.As more standards are ratified,the cost of setting up a VoIP network continues to drop.This is quite a different model from the traditionalPBX cost trends of the last few decades.This chapter explores how to go aboutbuilding an ROI proposal that in most cases will justify a conversion to packe-tized voice.We specifically discuss Cisco’s VoIP solution,known as Cisco IPTelephony (CIPT).We explore link layer VoIP technologies such as VoFR andVoATM.These are just the tip of the iceberg.As VoIP becomes more widespreadand ubiquitous,we will begin to see applications that we can’t even imagine yet.Moving voice from a closed proprietary system to an open standards-based archi-tecture will revolutionize the phone industry and the world as much as theInternet has in terms of communication and the way business is transacted.

Common VoIP Implementation Services

Today’s PSTN is based on the transmission of analog signals over switched circuits.In contrast,VoIP networks send digitized voice over a packet-based network.Aswe shall see,VoIP networks can offer telephony services at compelling prices.

Toll Bypass

Relative to the Internet,the PSTN offers voice services with expensive charges,or tolls.Toll bypassis the avoidance of PSTN charges by using data networks,suchas the Internet,to carry voice conversations.Figure 1.2 shows a simple exampleof toll bypass using gateways that are capable of providing an interface betweenan IP network and a traditional PBX.

VoFR

Voice over frame relay (VoFR)is the use of a Frame Relay network to carry IPpackets containing digitized voice packets.IP phones and voice-capable switchesor routers may be hooked up to this Frame Relay network to digitize voice sig-nals and place them into IP packets.The IP packets are carried to their destina-tions via the Frame Relay network.

VoATM

Voice over asynchronous transfer mode (VoATM)is the use of an ATM network tocarry digitized voice packets.Instead of carrying variable-length frames,an ATMnetwork carries small fixed-length frames called cells.Each cell is 53 bytes longand contains a 5-byte header and a 48-byte payload.In an ATM network,theVoIP packet is segmented and placed inside these cells.The small fixed ATM cellsize offers many advantages.Its small size means that the latency or delay as thecell passes through an ATM switch is very short.In contrast,the store-and-for-ward delay of an IP packet through a router is much longer because the last bit ofthe packet must be received before the first bit can be transmitted.ATM switches are extremely fast,and the quality of service offered by ATMnetworks can be very high.In addition,ATM offers various class of service (CoS)options such as constant bit rate (CBR) that was designed specifically for trans-porting voice and other real-time protocols.CBR provides a better quality ofservice by minimizing time variations in the transmission of voice cells,a phe-nomenon known as jitte

Point-to-Point Links

The use of point-to-point links to interconnect a company’s offices allows acompany to build and administer its own private network.Using VoIP overpoint-to-point links allows a common IP staff to operate both voice and datatransmission services.Common link layer protocols used on point-to-point linksare High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) and Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP).

Cisco IP Telephony

The VoIP portion of the evolving Cisco Architecture for Voice,Video,andIntegrated Data (AVVID) is Cisco IP Telephony,or CIPT.CIPT is the corner-stone of Cisco’s VoIP solution and is fast replacing traditional PBXs.Let’s discussCIPT’s major components.

Cisco IP Telephony Clients

Telephones capable of digitizing voice signals are known as IP telephony clientsorsimply IP phones.They contain digital signal processors (DSPs) to perform thisfunction.Cisco offers a variety of such IP telephony clients.In particular,theCisco IP Phone 7960 and IP Phone 7940 are feature-rich and include smallliquid crystal display (LCD) displays,control buttons,and multiline capabilities.The Cisco IP Conference Station 7935 is an IP conference phone.

IP Softphones

The Cisco IP SoftPhone is a virtual telephone that runs in a Windows desktopPC or laptop.IP softphonesare personal computers that contain software to allowthem to operate as IP telephony clients.The PCs contain speakers and micro-phones that can operate similarly to a telephone handset.In addition,the IP tele-phony software digitizes the voice signals and sends the voice packets across theIP network.Softphones provide a rich environment for development ofTAPIapplications,such as Web click-to-talk.

Cisco Call Manager

The Cisco Call Manager (CCM) is a software call-processing application thatruns on a Cisco Media Convergence Server (MCS).The CCM takes the place ofa PBX and performs several key functions:Registering IP telephony devicesCall processingAdministering dial plans and route plans Managing resourcesA group or pair of redundant call managers can support up to 2500 users.Acluster of redundant call manager groups can support up to 10,000 telephony users.In the Cisco IP telephony schema,call managers perform the functions tradi-tionally performed by PBXs.As we shall see,being software-based,the CCM canbe continually enhanced to provide features beyond those traditionally providedby PBXs.