Bandwidth Management: A More Complex Equation?

The issue of inadequate bandwidth has become a business problem. Consumers, fed up with slow connections, seek alternate providers; companies or researchers wishing to do video conferencing or trying to crunch data on high-speed computers, lose money and time waiting for crowded Internet connections to let them do their work.

Bandwidth is a finite resource, and every year the demand becomes greater for both mobile and fixed connections particularly as the fast-expanding economies found in Brazil, India and China come online. Beyond the consumer market, businesses are turning to more virtual presence technologies to slash travel costs, especially given the rough economy in the United States and Europe.

But with this crowding problem comes as an opportunity for bandwidth providers in the satellite sector. The drive to provide data efficiently is leading the development of innovative technologies aimed at alleviating the bandwidth space crunch. “In almost anything we do today in communication, you will have a satellite,” says David Furstenberg, chairman, Novelsat.

New Satellites

High Throughput Satellites (HTS), whether Ka-band or not, carry more capacity than traditional satellites and are now becoming part of the equation. As satellite operators look to invest in these satellites, managing bandwidth will become a key issue.

iDirect aims to play a key role in helping operators manage this bandwidth. A company could have a network that includes both traditional broad-beamed satellites and the narrower spot beams, providing a global pool of bandwidth upon which a firm can draw. As such, an HTS could help offer a more diversified asset base, says Greg Quiggle, iDirect’s vice president of product management.

“Depending on the agreement [a company] negotiates and the satellite operator they use, they can leverage spot beam capacity or leverage broad beam capacity,” he says. “In both those cases we, in iDirect, would want to make sure the service is as close to real time as possible, based on bandwidth management roles put in place.”

iDirect, which provides satellite-based IP communications technology, has prioritized bandwidth management and traffic for several years. A typical customer purchases an amount of bandwidth that would be shared across multiple terminals within the network. That network, however, can prioritize certain types of traffic such as data, for example, which demands more real-time access. Certain terminals within the network may be assigned a higher priority as well.

Service providers determine which types of traffic have priority, control the quality of service settings, and offer service-level agreements to customers to reflect that, Quiggle says. “Some customers say all remotes are equal, but voice gets the highest priority in my network. So we configure the system so that if any remote has a voice call, it needs to proceed. The system ensures there is enough bandwidth in that terminal to do it,” he adds.

To achieve this, iDirect prioritizes packets based on the quality of service profiles contained in the individual Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocols. “In the inbound direction, each TDMA frame carries traffic from multiple remotes in different time slots. A remote can transmit in any of the available time slots, which are dynamically allocated to remotes based upon demand and traffic priority rules,” Quiggle says.

Managed Satellite Services

Globecomm, a satellite network solutions provider, is working on driving the evolution to managed satellite services. The company offers its customers application optimization that also feeds into proprietary network management tools that clients have access to. “[It’s] understanding where services are affected and what applications are being affected,” says Michele Scotto, vice president of service products, Globecomm.

The company makes use of overall network management because, at times, transportation can shift the demand from one terminal to another. “If you have a ship or an airplane transferring around the world, in some cases it uses broad beam satellites and in some cases spot beam satellites. Ultimately, the end user doesn’t want to configure bandwidth management rules for every situation they can run into. A global network is much more robust and makes those rules much more sustainable,” says Scotto.

Globecomm provides services ranging from satellite and terrestrial bandwidth to direct-use applications such as interactive video. The technology is available directly for mobile and LAN users, which is important, Scotto says, because the user doesn’t have to spend time configuring the network themselves, saving time and money. “It’s ubiquitous, and they have no idea what’s going on in the network,” he says.

Hardware or Software?

There is a debate over whether it is best to invest in new hardware or to invest in better bandwidth management software. On one side, there is the argument that an aging point-of-access is a hindrance to efficient data transmission. Contrasting that is the argument that investing in new terminals is a large capital cost.

Scotto, however, cautions that companies should look to bandwidth optimization strategies before adding capacity. Too much unused bandwidth could be detrimental to profits, he says.

“As networks change and the market changes, if an organization is not on top of it… they can easily have detrimental effects on their bottom line if they have capacity that is not utilized.” To address this, Scotto says Globecomm is initially driving its bandwidth optimization partners “to incorporate terrestrial optimization or terrestrial capacity management as part of their platform.” He adds that customers should look at all network connectivity options and the performance required, regardless of whether they choose to be wired or wireless platforms, as newer options may be cheaper to run and justify the inherent cost of upgrading.

While newer technology is available to enterprise-level customers, Furstenberg says there is always an initial hesitance toward investing. Although there may be a lower data cost associated with replacing an old terminal, the upfront purchase expense usually makes companies shy away from this option until there are multiple reasons to make the shift.

Video

Video is the number one challenge for Globecomm’s management, but Scotto says he is not sure if that’s because demand for video is increasing, or if the want for other types of services such as voice is decreasing. “From the network aspect, we cannot tell. It looks just like data,” he says. Market indicators, he adds, show that for traditional video networks such as cable or direct to home, demand has been stable, while mobile video demand is increasing.

“Obviously the bandwidth is much higher with video than with voice,” says Quiggle, pointing out that video conferencing demand is driving a lot of the increased usage. “Video requires a considerable amount of capacity for it to meet a minimal level of acceptable quality. Technology will continue to drive less bits per frame of video. However, the explosion of video creation and its subsequent consumption is by far the largest driver of network capacity needs,” he says.

Work Microwave, a developer of frequency converters, DVB-S2 equipment and other digital signal processing technologies, sees dynamic bandwidth management as “a definite requirement for how the IP (network) provides their product to the customer,” says Joerg Rockstroh, senior research and development engineer at Work. He adds that it allows the network to adjust its bandwidth depending on the type of traffic coming through it – video would receive more real-time access, for example.

The Cloud

Whatever method a company chooses to address bandwidth, they will need to act quickly, says Marcus Weldon, the chief technology officer of Alcatel-Lucent, a major player in the telecoms space. The company works in fields ranging from data centers to Internet protocol video. When it comes to bandwidth, it uses data centers closer to the end user. This allows customers to focus their usage on one particular center so they do not need to consume bandwidth across the spectrum.

For security and convenience reasons, companies today are moving to cloud-based services – putting their vital information in remote data centers – rather than storing that data on site. Weldon points to this trend as a key area when Alcatel-Lucent looks at bandwidth management.

You’ve got your desktop in the cloud, your audio content in the cloud, and everything will be streamed to me,” Weldon says. “We’ve made the world in future a very challenging place.”
– Marcus Weldon, Alcatel-Lucent

Cloud-based services are also changing the way hardware is being acquired. Low-capacity tablet computers, Weldon says, are quickly outstripping the sales of traditional desktop and laptop computers that store much more data. “More iPads will be sold than [personal computers] this year. Soon, within two more years, more iPads will be sold than laptops,” he says. “iPads, because they are mobile devices, have limited power and weight and cost requirements, which means [customers] will never have all the storage they want, or all the processing power they want. They start needing the cloud to produce the rest of the functionality.”

This will create a whole new paradigm in the next five years. “You’ve got your desktop in the cloud, your audio content in the cloud, and everything will be streamed to me,” Weldon says. “We’ve made the world in future a very challenging place.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s IP networks change rapidly even year by year, Weldon says. “IP networks are built to be flexible, dynamically rerouting and finding ways around bottlenecks,” he says, adding that optimization is now moving inside the data center to allow dynamic adaptation of the data center network as well as the wide area network. “As we move to all-IP [networks] and highly distributed computing infrastructure, those are the degrees of freedom we have that will allow us to optimize the placement of an application and deliver it to you,” he says.

Optimizing the hardware, Weldon says, allows providers to economically optimize physical bandwidth capacity required to transmit information. However, cloud infrastructure itself is becoming more intelligent and separated from the hardware, allowing the network scalability and flexibility to improve. Weldon calls this technology, also known as software defined networks (SDN), “the big concept in our industry.” When implemented, “the application will request what it needs, and relinquish that need when it’s finished,” he says. “You, as the intelligent owner of the network, will optimize across all applications, with the best you can do given all applications.”