The Hindu Business Line : Web of networks

Convergence is the buzz word today, although we are probably years away from true convergence — a scenario where all networks, both public and private, would be interconnected and information would pass through as if it was a single pipe.

Sampath `Sam' Srinivas, Chief Technologist at Juniper Networks, an IIT Madras alumnus with a doctorate from Stanford, takes eWorld through key trends in technology evolution and how networks of the future will change the way we live.Excerpts:

How do you see convergence changing the face of networks of the future?

Historically, we have seen multiple, parallel, special-purpose networks built up for communicating information electronically. Telegraph came first, Telephones came next, then we had Radio, then we had Television, then we had commercial proprietary Data Networks, and the Internet entered the public consciousness in the last 10 to 15 years. All of these run in parallel today. All the pre-Internet networks are purpose-built for one particular application which they do well, albeit expensively and without much flexibility.

As computers and digital electronics have advanced, it has become possible to convert all information (sound, pictures, text) to digital form and manipulate the information flexibly in ways that we could not dream of before. In a closely-related development, the rise of the Internet has allowed all digital information to be broken into chunks and transmitted from place to place using the Internet's open and universally accepted protocols in an extremely flexible and cost-effective way, which we could not dream of before.

These developments have resulted in an accelerating trend of Convergence where all electronic communication is converging to the Internet. As the trend plays out, older, special-purpose networks (Telephone, TV, etc) will slowly become obsolete as the special purpose application they provided (Voice, Video, etc) becomes just one application on the universal connectivity provided to every corner of the planet by the Internet. Thus in, say, 10 to 20 years from now, the average home or office or personal mobile device will likely be just one big information pipe coming into it which connects it to the global Internet.

What are the trends you see emerging in this area?

One structure to support many services.

Convergence will happen in phases, in fact, it is happening all around us already. One immediate trend for enterprises is that many of them are moving away from connecting remote branches through expensive older methods of data connectivity and just using secure data tunnels such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) over the public Internet. Another immediate trend is the rise of Voice over the Internet (VoIP).This is taking off rapidly with telephone networks moving away from legacy voice equipment to VoIP running on an IP network. At the next stage, VoIP will come to all the way to the desk phone for most enterprises and consumers.

On the regular Internet, consumers can see clear glimpses of the converged future when they use services such as voice of Skype and video calls over Yahoo and MSN Messenger from their broadband connected PCs.

From an Indian perspective, have we reached the inflection point where broadband and triple play is actually taking off?

Broadband has still not widely penetrated in India though it is growing rapidly. So consumer triple play services, where telephony, regular Internet access and video are delivered to most homes, is still quite far away. But this does not mean that convergence is not playing out in the central core portions of the network and in the enterprise today in India!

Convergence also includes under its umbrella the biggest trend of all, the proliferation of mobile phones — as 3G gets deployed, India's huge population of mobile users will have an Internet-connected, highly capable communication device in their hands — which will provide converged services!

IPTV seems to be the buzz word. How do you see India transitioning into this space?

IPTV refers to broadcast television (and on-demand video) being delivered over the Internet. This is a trend that service providers worldwide are looking at very seriously, though it is still early in terms of worldwide adoption. One challenge in India, of course, is the fact that consumer broadband is still in its early stages of adoption. That said, each market for IPTV has to figure out what the key value proposition is for the end user — we do have forward-thinking service providers in India working actively on figuring this out.

How does Juniper see itself playing a role in this next generation networks?

Today, Juniper is one of the world's leading providers of infrastructure for building IP networks. Our contribution is such that whenever anybody, anywhere on the planet, uses the Internet today, the chances are nearly 100 per cent that the communication passes through Juniper equipment somewhere in the globe.

Going forward, we will continue to provide products that provide the security and assurance that the next generation network needs. To ensure that the full potential of the next generation Internet is realised, we are working with the rest of the industry to ensure that new open standards and protocols that are needed in areas such as service provisioning, quality of service, fault tolerance, security, etc, are put in place.

Are Indian telecom companies able to transition to this, given the fact that some of the networks are pretty new?

The fact that many of the Indian networks are new is actually their key advantage. In developed countries, networks carry a large amount of legacy drag where they have to support and monetise older technology investments while also trying to make the transition to the new.

In contrast, Indian networks have been able to leapfrog some of the older legacy and are thus set up to move very fast. Another key factor helping the Indian service providers is the world-class visionary and technical talent they have on board.

As a related example of a different kind of network going through change, look at the trend of starting low-cost value airlines with key operational efficiencies — you will find that the Greenfield new operators are the ones who have the leg up. The airlines operating on the older model have a certain business model to protect and so they cannot have the same flexibilities that the new airlines with no legacy drag have (such as no business class seats, only Internet booking, etc).

There is this feeling that some of the new technology applications willwould be driven from South-East Asia. Your views? what are your views on this.

Some of the technology applications are driven from South-East Asia — at a very high level this is because of the same ‘less legacy, new build’ kind of advantage. Some examples where South-East Asia has some very cutting edge stuff going on: One of the largest successful deployments of IPTV in the world today is in Hong Kong. One of the key first steps of true convergence converge is converting the backbone of the network to pure IP away from legacy protocols — some mobile operators in South-East Asia have all IP backbones now. Juniper is proud to be a key infrastructure provider and enabler in both of these situations.

Other more subtle factors driving innovation in South-East Asia are things like the density of urban living. Very high speed broadband has seen early adoption in markets such as like Hong Kong and Singapore — this deployment is made practical by the dense multi-storey type living, which allows high-speed optical fibre to come closer to more people more quickly and inexpensively compared, for example, to the ‘spread out’ layout of American suburbs.

Coming now to South Asia, with India as the big weight, there is a unique combination of extreme value consciousness by the consumer and also a critical mass of technical talent in this market — and so as 3G happens (another aspect of convergence), there is hope that some of the innovation to crack the code on developing the key new applications which pay may happen out of the Indian market.

Security seems to be a major concern in new networks?

The converged network is by definition going to be more open and intelligent. These are the characteristics that make it more flexible. But this is also what the bad guys could try to misuse. So one has to have extreme awareness of security issues. The industry is well aware of this and many of the key security standards are already widely deployed and more are being worked on.

As an example, think of voice over IP on the converged network of tomorrow. Since your call might no longer flow on closed proprietary networks, you could have a fear that the call could be tapped. For such a concern, good solutions exist. One can encrypt the traffic end-to-end with standardised methods that cannot be tampered with by someone in the middle of the chain.which are essentially undefeatable by someone in the middle.

Now taking another tack, considering that the voice call and other traffic such as Web site hits flow as packets through the same equipment, a criminal could think of trying to generate massive amounts of traffic (say lots of spurious Web site requests) in the network with the goal of overloading the network so much that the voice network gets disrupted (this is called denial of service).

To avoid this, the equipment comprising the network has to be smart enough to detect attacks and drop them. The Internet standards have to allow for tagging of traffic so that the equipment can know what is legitimate voice traffic and give it top priority, etc. Lots of industry-wide work is under waygoing to ensure that the appropriate standards and mechanisms are in place to address these issues.issues like these.

How do you actually define a NextGen nextgen network and how close are we towards its introduction?

There are various definitions of NextGen networks — in fact, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has done significant work on trying to come up with standard definitions and architectures.

However, all definitions agree on a core premise: A NextGen network is based on the Internet Protocol (IP). All services are provided as applications on this IP foundation — in other words, convergence is a fundamental part of the NextGen network.

The introduction of NextGen networks is best seen as a process that will play out over many years and rather than a focussed event. The early stages of the NextGen network are being formed around you as we speak — some of it is in the plumbing that we never see as individuals, and sometimes we see it directly, for example, when we listen to a music stream on the Internet.

vrishi@thehindu.co.in

Picture by VINO JOHN

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