The evolution of MAN
While the networking world was busy hotting up Ethernet and turning wireless into a reality, telecommunications carriers were busily crawling around under the streets and paddocks of Australia, laying thousands of kilometres of fibre-optic cable that now make Australia's cities among the most wired in the world.
Use of DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology has allowed carriers to lay multiple strands of fibre, light up just a few of them at relatively low speeds, and bring additional fibres operating at increased density as future technologies allow. This means there is enough potential for bandwidth running over Australian networks to keep up with demand for some time to come.
Just where this demand will come from has long been the subject of considerable speculation, and as carriers evolve their product offerings it's becoming increasingly clear that Web surfing is only the tip of the iceberg. Far more important to businesses in the long run will be the use of those fibre connections to form Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), which offer scads of bandwidth between branch offices and partners within a city.
Because they rely on a cloud approach to networking that utilises carriers' massive economies of scale, MANs can potentially be more cost-effective on a dollars-per-Mbps basis than current wide-area networks built around bundles of ISDN and Frame Relay links. Their design inherently supports high-speed versions of technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, which has no problem at all traversing many kilometres of fibre-optic cabling.
With IP firmly established as the protocol of choice over these networks, carriers have fulfilled their once-grandiose vision of providing an "IP dialtone" to customers. Several top-tier carriers already offer bandwidth-on-demand services that deliver anywhere from 10Mbps to 1000Mbps of an IP dialtone to your wall. Fibre-based MANs have even provided a reprieve for ATM, which persists as an IP transport mechanism within many carrier backbones and is available from some telcos in 155Mbps and 622Mbps flavours.
Although they're obviously indispensable as a way of providing fast connections between branch offices, the lightning speed of MANs will really come into its own as companies become more creative in the ways they utilise the capacity.
Key among these new uses will be the ability to distribute parts of the network that have traditionally been kept on local area networks because of their demand for extremely fast transmission speed.
Using Fibre Channel over an IP-based MAN, for example, it's possible to build a storage area network (SAN) that links branch-office networks with storage farms in a remote location. This would ease centralisation of corporate data and allow for increased fault resilience, particularly through thetip of the iceberg. Far more important to businesses in the long run will be the use of those fibre connections to form Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), which offer scads of bandwidth between branch offices and partners within a city.
Because they rely on a cloud approach to networking that utilises carriers' massive economies of scale, MANs can potentially be more cost-effective on a dollars-per-Mbps basis than current wide-area networks built around bundles of ISDN and Frame Relay links. Their design inherently supports high-speed versions of technologies such as Gigabit Ethernet, which has no problem at all traversing many kilometres of fibre-optic cabling.
With IP firmly established as the protocol of choice over these networks, carriers have fulfilled their once-grandiose vision of providing an "IP dialtone" to customers. Several top-tier carriers already offer bandwidth-on-demand services that deliver anywhere from 10Mbps to 1000Mbps of an IP dialtone to your wall. Fibre-based MANs have even provided a reprieve for ATM, which persists as an IP transport mechanism within many carrier backbones and is available from some telcos in 155Mbps and 622Mbps flavours.
Although they're obviously indispensable as a way of providing fast connections between branch offices, the lightning speed of MANs will really come into its own as companies become more creative in the ways they utilise the capacity.
Key among these new uses will be the ability to distribute parts of the network that have traditionally been kept on local area networks because of their demand for extremely fast transmission speed.
Using Fibre Channel over an IP-based MAN, for example, it's possible to build a storage area network (SAN) that links branch-office networks with storage farms in a remote location. This would ease centralisation of corporate data and allow for increased fault resilience, particularly through the mirroring of the database to similar servers at a physically distant third site. In the case of service disruption, all MAN-connected branch offices could easily switch to the backup storage array using the same fibre links.
"This means the tyranny of distance within a city potentially goes away completely," says Andrew Cox, director of emerging technologies and services with wholesale bandwidth provider COMindico, which launched its nationwide IP services network in October.
MANs will allow companies to centralise application servers without incurring the performance hit they currently absorb when squeezing applications over relatively small WAN pipes. Although thin-client delivery systems such as Citrix Metaframe have ameliorated this problem somewhat, network-speed MANs will remove the artificial boundaries between LAN and WAN, allowing even fat client applications to thrive.
Further adoption of MANs will eventually allow you to completely eliminate workgroup servers from your network. Instead of traditional hub-and-spoke network designs, individual desktops or wireless base stations will be connected to a central office switch that steers their traffic directly onto the MAN. From there, it will be shuttled directly to the centralised application servers, providing a direct conduit to a variety of application services.
Of course, those services don't even need to be running within the company's own network. Given the ubiquity of IP, it's just as easy for those services to be maintained by a third party. That's the gist of e-services initiatives from companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Telstra, which recently opened up a massive data centre in Melbourne to support its online services push.
"If you can make the applications work together, you can create a whole which is greater than the sum of the parts," says Cox, who anticipates strong demand for MAN-based collaboration, unified messaging, and virtual private networks.
He even believes MANs could breathe life into the ailing application service provider (ASP) sector, which has struggled to validate its existence in the face of customer hesitance over performance and management concerns.
"It's hard for an ASP business to get started because it has to justify the cost of connectivity to each customer," he explains. "Ubiquitous connectivity and interoperability [through a MAN] will even make the cost of this justifiable to a small business, who would find the benefits sufficient to justify a 2Mbps pipe from their network to ours. Once they have that pipe, they could outsource their messaging [or application] network and get credible performance."
MANs can also remove much of the uncertainty that's accompanied bandwidth planning in the past. Since carriers offer bandwidth on demand, you no longer have to purchase bandwidth pipes based on usage projections that turn out to be hopelessly inaccurate down the road. You could potentially set a committed bandwidth rate at Ethernet speeds, then crank it up to Gigabit Ethernet to hasten the nightly transfer of data to your remote backup site for archiving.
The many possible uses for MANs have seen carriers and network equipment vendors alike latch onto the concept as a potential saviour for revenues that have been positively anaemic during most of this year. Having realised that spending hundreds of millions of dollars to lay glass strands in the ground isn't a business model of its own, they've recently embarked on a flurry of creativity that should ultimately result in a bevy of new services.
Metropolitan area networking will be further boosted by the development of 10G Ethernet, the next stage in the Ethernet legacy, which promises to further supplant ATM within carrier networks by providing ten times as much bandwidth over fibre MAN links. Look for 10G Ethernet products to hit the market next year, with telco service offerings based on the technology by 2003 or so.
Get on the line
MANs are still evolving, and many of the carrier-hosted services they will enable are only likely to hit the market next year. In the meantime, equipment vendors and integrators alike say one of their biggest revenue spinners in the short term is coming from the implementation of Voice over IP (VoIP), that long-emerging standard that just a few years ago threatened carriers so much they tried to have it banned.
VoIP has grown up considerably from its early days as an Internet novelty. Its high-quality compression allows perfectly acceptable voice conversations to be transmitted over what is typically between 4Kbps and 8Kbps of bandwidth. That's low enough to allow dozens or hundreds of calls to be carried over existing networks without incurring much of a performance hit, and today's networking gear is bristling with voice gateways that simplify the process of adding voice to your network.
"More and more, we're seeing that media-rich applications are giving organisations the productivity and they are looking for," says Roland Chia, chief technology officer of multi services networking with systems integrator Dimension Data, who reports significant interest in VoIP among the company's longtime clients.
In early implementations, VoIP was set up as a method for allowing suitably equipped PABX replacements to shuttle calls over IP networks to other branch offices or gateways that drop them off into the public switched telephony network within the city of its destination. By allowing companies to avoid sending their calls over expensive STD loops in the conventional network, VoIP used in this manner can provide for significant savings (50 percent or more is not uncommon, depending on calling patterns). It's also relatively cheap because it only replaces the inter-PABX links, while leaving existing handsets to function as normal.
Where this approach falls over, however, is in its reliance upon maintaining separate telephony and data networks within the office. Each of those networks requires its own team of experts and has its own maintenance requirements, a fact that has led many companies to take VoIP further into their hearts.
These organisations are working to do away with telephony networks altogether by installing IP-enabled handsets that act like any other network node. These handsets offer similar features to conventional phones-such as call forwarding, voicemail, conference calling, and the like. However, they are little more than terminals interfacing with a data-enabled PABX replacement, which is often simply a Windows NT or 2000 server running specialised software and telephony network interfaces. With voice-enabled network switches now common, these devices can also replace the dedicated server with their dedicated voice call routing capabilities.
Savings from VoIP are demonstrable and considerable. The State Library of Victoria, for one, recently implemented a converged voice and data network that it expects will save over $100,000 a year in maintenance costs, while the CSIRO-Australia's largest VoIP user-anticipates savings several times as large after rolling out nearly 10,000 VoIP handsets. Savings come not only from a reduction in call costs, but from the reduction in management effort and the eventual elimination of a dedicated team of telephony network specialists. "We've done this so many times already, and we're getting better each time," says Chia. "If you just plan for pure and simple IP data, ignoring voice and data, you'll face an expensive upgrade down the road. These applications, along with applications such as data-enabled call centres and unified messaging, will deliver competitive advantages that are going to drive the business case, pure and simple."
With convergence between voice and data now well established as a cost-cutting measure, now is the time for you to begin looking into VoIP, if you haven't done so already. Its relatively easy implementation and rapid cost savings make it an ideal candidate for implementation during harsh economic times, and its long-term benefits mean it should be high on your list.
Voice isn't the only multimedia application gaining currency on Australia's networks. Large amounts of available bandwidth-particularly in the wide area-have made quality of service concerns less of an issue than they used to be, since sheer bandwidth can potentially deliver data so fast that service guarantees become less of a concern. This means videoconferencing is more practical than ever, both through standalone room units and through sub-$100 desktop cameras.
Interestingly enough, videoconferencing outsourcers have reported record bookings in the months since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Videoconferencing also allows for richer communication by conveying body language as well as voice. It also allows companies to eliminate the substantial expense of airfares, hotels, car rental, and the other costs of face-to-face meetings. Talk with your travel co-ordinator before taking a videoconferencing business case to the board, and you'll be surprised how much their eyes light up.
Your story gets a bit repetitive around paragraph nine in the MAN chapter...