- Telephone (POTS and VoIP)
- Broadband Internet
- Private Business Networks
- Interactive Entertainment
- Smart Grid
- In Home Medical Care
- FEMTO (Cell Phone Access Point)
- Security Monitoring
- Smart Communities
NEXT GENERATION BROAD BAND SERVICES
Business Opportunities
The EntryPoint Virtual Broadband Gateway (VBG) facilitates Next Generation Broadband Services by delivering multiple broadband connections to a single premise. The EntryPoint Gateway is engineered to optimize these new services for the customer and create new revenue opportunities for the service provider. Each of these private networks is not limited by the restrictions of net neutrality because they are not associated with internet traffic.
Current Generation Services
Today, the telephone and cable networks are the core means of communication for nearly every type of business and are integrated into the lifestyles of consumers throughout the world. The Internet operates on a best-effort basis where all packets receive equal treatment as they are routed through the network, hop-by-hop to their ultimate destination. This principle is commonly known as net neutrality.
A neutral broadband network is one that is free of control or restrictions on such things as content, sites, or platforms. While this model of fairness has advantages for the general public, it is a significant barrier for business plans that depend on a need to receive priority treatment and the ability to control service level delivery of information packets. In these cases, net neutrality becomes a business obstacle which prevents evolution of certain service offerings. The collision of broad support for the idea of net neutrality and the business need for some services to receive priority packet treatment provide the need to deliver some services over broadband networks that are not associate with the public internet.
Facilitating Next Generation Services
Customer demand and business requirements are fueling evolution and innovation of new services to be delivered over broadband networks. These new services include such things as smart grid, interactive entertainment, in-home medical care, femto cells (cell phone access point), home security monitoring, smart communities. In order to facilitate the delivery of these Next Generation Services, a Next Generation Broadway Gateway is needed.
Gateways Features for Optimizing Next Generation Services
- Pushes Network Intelligence to the Customer Premise
- Creates a New Edge or Demark for Quality of Service (QoS)
- Provides Advanced Traffic Management
- Utilizes Open Standards
- Enhances Network Security
Pushing Network Intelligence to the Customer Premise
Currently, broadband network intelligence commonly resides at the Central office of the telephone company or at a remote access point between the Central Office and the customer premise. The ability to stretch intelligence all the way to the premise is necessary to set the stage for a leap forward in service creation and to enable business offerings that depend on control for meeting service level agreements. Stretching intelligence to the premise means that broadband traffic is optimized to associate traffic streams with their applications and able to be managed and processed according to predefined Service Level Agreements (SLA).
Establishing a New Edge or Demark for Quality of Service (QoS)
To ensure that each service receives the appropriate QoS treatment and meets SLA obligations, next generation gateways should manage, monitor, and control network traffic at the service level so that services requiring priority over other traffic will receive it.
Providing Advanced Traffic Management
Once the gateway has classified and groomed the service flows appropriately, advanced traffic management and engineering services should be applied to collect and map service flows efficiently onto the network to control network behavior, optimize network resources, and maximize traffic delivery performance.
Managing at the Service Level
By extending the switching protocol to the customer premise, transport carriers can apply virtual switching and facilitate the delivery of extremely scalable, efficient, and secure private networks directly to the customer's doorstep.
Utilizing Open Standards for an Open Network
The use of open standards and an open network is crucial for true innovation and advancement which takes place not at the transport layer, but at the service layer. An open network policy requires that the network be truly open to all services, no matter how innovative or unexpected.
Enhancing Network Security
Separating services from transport will create new cooperative relationships in which carriers will become service enablersť for service providers, providing QoS necessary for a trusted environment delivering security, privacy, and reliability. By separating service from transport as suggested, the carrier can provide protection from attacks such as ARP spoofing, Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) attacks, Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, and other threats.
