With the advent of voice over IP (VOIP), companies need to re-examine their infrastructure, policy, security and compliance issues if they want to stay abreast with this technology, but building their own next-generation networks (NGNs) is not recommended, said Nicolas Turner, VP and GM (Europe, Middle East and Africa) at NexTone.
Turner was speaking at a Square One Solutions Group road show in Johannesburg this week, aimed at examining next-generation IP trends.
Service providers are urged not to build NGNs, as they will be looking at spending a lot of money, time and taking unnecessary risks in the process, he said.
"It is much more viable to outsource these networks and services," said Turner, "and it is possible to do this while maintaining full visibility and control."
The key to achieving this is session-based architectures, based on the session initiation protocol, which "allows you to plug-in to other networks" and promises to deliver innovative services and drive down cost, he added.
"It would take at least two years to build your own network, but if you plug into an existing backbone, you can have access to the technology in a week," said Turner.
Latency
"With session management, the security issue is solved," Turner said.
Session management, which he refers to as "the glue that holds network assets together", provides a paradigm for maintaining control over VOIP solutions by attaching users securely to all applications.
There is a definite move to Web-based applications, said Trevor Dearing, from Juniper Networks enterprise solutions, EMEA, but bandwidth is still a restricting factor.
"Broadband is becoming a commodity," he explained, "and SA is in a strong position because of its 'rapid rate of change`.
"The challenge here is that regardless of how broadband is used, WAN affects it," he said. In a Web-based environment, HTML requests are processed, not simple data packets, and 20 times as much traffic is used as would be on a LAN client-server.
"Old generation or traditional networks had limited WAN user experience and saw a lot of money invested in transporting data. NGNs focus more on giving a user an equivalent LAN and WAN experience and are therefore more focused on traffic processing."
Increasing speed
So how can speed be increased on a WAN?
"The answer lies in the technology," Dearing explained. "Through a process of compression and caching, it becomes possible to support increasingly rich content and eliminate repetition across the WAN."
The solution to increasing speed on a WAN is molecular sequence reduction, network sequence caching and application acceleration, he said.
"Latency is the leading cause of slow applications, and two areas are affected - the TCP and application layer," said Dearing.
"Genius," concluded Turner, "is not about inventing, but about whether or not you can copy and paste well."
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