Leading economies globally are anxiously staking out territory in the next-generation internet. However, with many research centres already operating in this area, Ireland has a head start
THE INFORMATION super highway is getting congested. It is also growing more powerful, with new applications and functionality becoming available almost every day. These developments have led to moves to define the next-generation internet, increasingly referred to as the “future internet”.
The scope and functionality of this future internet will be much broader than that of the internet we know today. Its core infrastructure will incorporate sensor networks, as well as wireless and fixed communications networks. Access and management of data, plus issues of privacy and accountability, are central to its development. However, its most important feature will be its focus on service, which will mean an emphasis on applications supporting all aspects of society, from health to education to commerce.
These developments will undoubtedly create opportunities in science, engineering and related fields. Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) recently hosted a high-level workshop to explore how Ireland can take advantage of such opportunities and establish itself as a leading force in the field.
The workshop brought together experts from industry and large research centres engaged in next-generation web technologies and applications. It offered an opportunity to map out a strategic plan for engagement at national and international level in a sector that affects virtually every aspect of life in today’s world.
Other countries have been quick to stake out territory.
“A move is now on by advanced economies to define and deliver next-generation internet, recognising its influential role as a driver of economic growth,” says Professor Fionn Murtagh, director of SFI’s Information, Communications and Emergent Technologies Directorate. “The US, South Korea, Japan, Australia, South Africa and Europe have already established major future internet initiatives.”
In Europe, 27 countries have established national initiatives to roll out future internet testbeds and trial services with a view to becoming early adopters in this field. “To take just one example, Spain invested over €300 million in future internet initiatives in the past year,” says Prof Murtagh.
“Ireland is now focused on formulating a comprehensive research and innovation road map that identifies our capacity to excel in this space, and the means by which we will attain such excellence.”
“The internet is becoming stressed with all the traffic and data it’s carrying,” adds Dr Sandra Collins, scientific programme manager with SFI. “There is already more data out there than you could read in a lifetime and it is doubling every 11 months.
“The future of the internet is partly about trying to understand what’s on it, as well as making the information more accessible. It’s also about making sure the infrastructure can carry all the data and services, as well as about the development of new applications and functions which take advantage of the increased power of that infrastructure.”
According to Dr Collins, Ireland has a disproportionate number of research centres operating in this area. This gives us a head start which can be exploited.
“SFI has invested more than €200 million to date in research that will build the future internet. SFI is funding five different Centres for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSets) in this area. We also have a large number of companies – such as IBM, Bell Labs and Ericsson – which collaborate in research and take the products of that research. Alongside that, we have many Irish SMEs – like Intune Networks, which develops network architecture to cope with the massive increase in unpredictable traffic demand.”
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Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Innovation Awards the Countdown - Irish Times
Shortlists for The Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation
Awards have been drawn up – and it was no easy task, writes MICHAEL McALEER
IT WAS A LONG and challenging day for the judges of this year’s Innovation Awards, with 21 company presentations to sit through and discuss, but the resounding response was that it rekindled a belief that Irish businesses can overcome the challenges they face.
The breadth of the shortlisted candidates and their inventiveness demonstrated the determination and innovation that’s often cloaked from view by the overwhelming national concern about the economy.
A look at the final shortlisted companies, ranging from public sector reformers to high-end IT or pharma innovators, offers a window into the depth of talent in Ireland.
...
Of the 21 selected companies, Intune Networks have been shorlisted in the Product Innovation category:
PRODUCT INNOVATION:
Intune Networks was founded in 1999 by two UCD graduates, John Dunne and Tom Farrell. It has developed advanced optical networking products that give carriers and internet service providers the capacity to meet growing demands for bandwidth.
An explosion in video content and emerging models for cloud-based services have put a strain on networks that is likely to get worse. Bottlenecks will be alleviated by what Dunne refers to as the “Holy Grail of networking”.
For 30 years, laboratories and universities had identified optical packet switching technology as the way forward but it took Dunne and Farrell to come up with a clever piece of IP that made it commercial and scalable.
Early investors were found in Britain and the US, as their Irish counterparts opted for property over technology.
More than 30 companies and institutions have signed up to use the testbed, including BT, Imagine, EMC, UCC Tyndall, NUI Galway, UCD and DCU. The Government has also invested €10 million towards the build of the Exemplar Network using Intune technology (pictured left).
...
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Awards have been drawn up – and it was no easy task, writes MICHAEL McALEER
IT WAS A LONG and challenging day for the judges of this year’s Innovation Awards, with 21 company presentations to sit through and discuss, but the resounding response was that it rekindled a belief that Irish businesses can overcome the challenges they face.
The breadth of the shortlisted candidates and their inventiveness demonstrated the determination and innovation that’s often cloaked from view by the overwhelming national concern about the economy.
A look at the final shortlisted companies, ranging from public sector reformers to high-end IT or pharma innovators, offers a window into the depth of talent in Ireland.
...
Of the 21 selected companies, Intune Networks have been shorlisted in the Product Innovation category:
PRODUCT INNOVATION:
Intune Networks was founded in 1999 by two UCD graduates, John Dunne and Tom Farrell. It has developed advanced optical networking products that give carriers and internet service providers the capacity to meet growing demands for bandwidth.
An explosion in video content and emerging models for cloud-based services have put a strain on networks that is likely to get worse. Bottlenecks will be alleviated by what Dunne refers to as the “Holy Grail of networking”.
For 30 years, laboratories and universities had identified optical packet switching technology as the way forward but it took Dunne and Farrell to come up with a clever piece of IP that made it commercial and scalable.
Early investors were found in Britain and the US, as their Irish counterparts opted for property over technology.
More than 30 companies and institutions have signed up to use the testbed, including BT, Imagine, EMC, UCC Tyndall, NUI Galway, UCD and DCU. The Government has also invested €10 million towards the build of the Exemplar Network using Intune technology (pictured left).
...
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Friday, January 21, 2011
Network Conundrum for a Web Service World - Intune Networks
"The era of static and predictable service traffic has been consigned to history"
The era of dynamic and unpredictable services traffic is now. Carrier networks, still designed with the operational requirement for accurate prediction of service traffic, have only seen incremental improvements rather than step change. Network operators must consider radical options to support future bandwidth demands for next generation services.
During the last decade internet and web services have become the de facto medium for communications, entertainment, information, and work. Service growth has followed exponentially, fusing spectacularly to the extent that it is difficult, or indeed impossible, to differentiate the service delivered and/or to distinguish the role that the consumer is performing. Yet despite these advancements in services, there has been no significant development or change to the primary network optical transport network since their introduction.
Networking mantra appears to have been to build the biggest optical pipes possible, at the lowest capital cost and fill them as full as possible. No serious consideration however has been given to the underlying services, resulting in ‘hub and spoke’ architectures being unnecessarily too big and costly with the spokes not connecting where the services need to be. The impact is significant increases in OPEX and TCO with low levels of asset utilisation. Network operators now need to fundamentally re-think their approach to meet future business demands.
Meanwhile, new market dynamics have created an environment where the pressures and demands on a carriers’ network and operations are growing exponentially whilst revenues and profits are simultaneously shrinking dramatically. Whilst innovation and investment has been made in IP routing and consumer devices, very little has changed in the underlying packet switching and optical fibre network that interconnect the IP based servers and routers to the IP enabled consumer devices.
Web services by their nature are dynamic and unpredictable and with increasingly set of video rich features - demanding ever increasing bandwidth per service and guaranteed quality of experience. However, the dilemma is that current carrier networks are managed and provisioned based upon predicted future patterns of usage from historical data that has taken days, weeks, and months to collate and is then analysed as a basis to predict and formulate future network changes. It is well acknowledged that accurate forward CAPEX investment planning for the network based on historical data is an increasingly impossible task to achieve, whilst being an exceptionally slow and costly process.
In addition, carriers have been unable to align their business and operational models and keep pace with the market and consumer demands – and therefore revenue opportunities. This discontinuity has created an overly complex, static, and unresponsive network infrastructure that continues to be disconnected from the services value chain.
The largest fixed cost within the carrier business is typically the network infrastructure which has remained largely the same – hierarchical and asymmetrical from the core through the metro to the access, whilst new services are symmetrical in profile, and hosted from a variety of distributed rather than centralised sources. Whilst service providers have strived to reduce operational costs through functional consolidation, process improvement and workforce reduction - fixed costs such as power and real estate remain very high and are directly correlated to the size and complexity of the network.
In the face of rapidly declining margins on traditional products and services, the service provider has been prevented in responding to the competitive market pressure to compete through service innovation and monetisation of new product revenues. This is not unsurprising as the current legacy network is hugely inflexible; it is unable to support introduction of new services and pricing models due to the lack of correlation of services carried to network resources consumed. This fact alone directly prevents the innovation and monetisation of new revenue models.
The legacy of tactical investment coupled with a lack of step change innovation by the traditional vendors has resulted in a network architecture that is a barrier to business. The network architecture is connection oriented – yet being tasked to deliver connectionless traffic. As a result, the current network technologies can never match the business economics to deliver the required level of service and associated lowest level of TCO – for any given service – resulting in a fundamental destabilisation of the business model.
Hub and spoke networks (by definition designed for connection-orientated traffic) are struggling because web services (connectionless protocols) have became the primary delivery vehicle for all services – including the rapid growth area of online video. Meanwhile, network operators also face the challenge that new demands for HD video need to be met with guaranteed bandwidth and low latency only afforded by connection-oriented networks.
Carriers now need to consider adopting transformational innovation versus continuing the deployment of repackaged hybrid products of today. The capability of this innovation must deliver automatic and dynamic response to any mix of incoming service flow traffic requirements - allocating network resources appropriately that are based upon the quality of service tiers required. To achieve this requires a fundamental change and reduction in the complexity of the network.
Read More
The era of dynamic and unpredictable services traffic is now. Carrier networks, still designed with the operational requirement for accurate prediction of service traffic, have only seen incremental improvements rather than step change. Network operators must consider radical options to support future bandwidth demands for next generation services.During the last decade internet and web services have become the de facto medium for communications, entertainment, information, and work. Service growth has followed exponentially, fusing spectacularly to the extent that it is difficult, or indeed impossible, to differentiate the service delivered and/or to distinguish the role that the consumer is performing. Yet despite these advancements in services, there has been no significant development or change to the primary network optical transport network since their introduction.
Networking mantra appears to have been to build the biggest optical pipes possible, at the lowest capital cost and fill them as full as possible. No serious consideration however has been given to the underlying services, resulting in ‘hub and spoke’ architectures being unnecessarily too big and costly with the spokes not connecting where the services need to be. The impact is significant increases in OPEX and TCO with low levels of asset utilisation. Network operators now need to fundamentally re-think their approach to meet future business demands.
Meanwhile, new market dynamics have created an environment where the pressures and demands on a carriers’ network and operations are growing exponentially whilst revenues and profits are simultaneously shrinking dramatically. Whilst innovation and investment has been made in IP routing and consumer devices, very little has changed in the underlying packet switching and optical fibre network that interconnect the IP based servers and routers to the IP enabled consumer devices.
Web services by their nature are dynamic and unpredictable and with increasingly set of video rich features - demanding ever increasing bandwidth per service and guaranteed quality of experience. However, the dilemma is that current carrier networks are managed and provisioned based upon predicted future patterns of usage from historical data that has taken days, weeks, and months to collate and is then analysed as a basis to predict and formulate future network changes. It is well acknowledged that accurate forward CAPEX investment planning for the network based on historical data is an increasingly impossible task to achieve, whilst being an exceptionally slow and costly process.
In addition, carriers have been unable to align their business and operational models and keep pace with the market and consumer demands – and therefore revenue opportunities. This discontinuity has created an overly complex, static, and unresponsive network infrastructure that continues to be disconnected from the services value chain.
The largest fixed cost within the carrier business is typically the network infrastructure which has remained largely the same – hierarchical and asymmetrical from the core through the metro to the access, whilst new services are symmetrical in profile, and hosted from a variety of distributed rather than centralised sources. Whilst service providers have strived to reduce operational costs through functional consolidation, process improvement and workforce reduction - fixed costs such as power and real estate remain very high and are directly correlated to the size and complexity of the network.
In the face of rapidly declining margins on traditional products and services, the service provider has been prevented in responding to the competitive market pressure to compete through service innovation and monetisation of new product revenues. This is not unsurprising as the current legacy network is hugely inflexible; it is unable to support introduction of new services and pricing models due to the lack of correlation of services carried to network resources consumed. This fact alone directly prevents the innovation and monetisation of new revenue models.
The legacy of tactical investment coupled with a lack of step change innovation by the traditional vendors has resulted in a network architecture that is a barrier to business. The network architecture is connection oriented – yet being tasked to deliver connectionless traffic. As a result, the current network technologies can never match the business economics to deliver the required level of service and associated lowest level of TCO – for any given service – resulting in a fundamental destabilisation of the business model.
Hub and spoke networks (by definition designed for connection-orientated traffic) are struggling because web services (connectionless protocols) have became the primary delivery vehicle for all services – including the rapid growth area of online video. Meanwhile, network operators also face the challenge that new demands for HD video need to be met with guaranteed bandwidth and low latency only afforded by connection-oriented networks.
Carriers now need to consider adopting transformational innovation versus continuing the deployment of repackaged hybrid products of today. The capability of this innovation must deliver automatic and dynamic response to any mix of incoming service flow traffic requirements - allocating network resources appropriately that are based upon the quality of service tiers required. To achieve this requires a fundamental change and reduction in the complexity of the network.
Read More
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