AT&T - BT IP Technology Platform Paper
This paper describes the technology aspects of the proposed global
joint venture between AT&T and BT. This section provides a high level summary of the
technical points of the venture, including a description of the underlying business needs,
the emerging technical challenges, and the proposed architectural approach. This approach
includes an innovative and open IP services platform that will allow the venture to:
By combining BT's and AT&T's core strengths, namely:
customer relationships and a deep understanding of their global needs; global and
multilateral network architectures and worldwide network operations; a unified technology
direction, including an IP platform currently under trial by AT&T; and strong business
operations and marketing systems, the global venture will deliver a new level of
sophisticated customer services across technology platforms that are truly global in
nature. A single global network architecture will permit the new company to
mirror the kinds of dynamic call routing, traffic management, and delivery of new
services, features and functionality common today in each company's domestic network.
The venture is aligning its architecture to respond to global telecommunications trends
that are seeing a shift in flavor from bilateral to multilateral relationships. Today, the U.S. market is home to 40 percent of the world's
largest companies. Europe is the second largest market, with 28 percent of the largest
companies headquartered there, and a further 25 percent in Japan. Through the combination
of their business operation, network assets and customer relationships, the new company
opens its doors with a significant presence in its home markets and a network footprint
that spans virtually ever country in the world. It will continue to offer and enhance the
full portfolio of voice and data services that customers enjoy today, while executing a
greatly accelerated plan to "jumpstart" development of an IP network connecting
the 100 largest economic centers worldwide. These economic centers today generate well
over 90% of the world's business telecommunications revenues. The venture will develop and deploy a global IP network with an open
platform that will be adopted by the parents' domestic networks as well. This, in
turn, will put the venture in a strong position to guide open industry standards in order
to grow its own and third party application and services. At the heart of the combined network will be an IP architecture
designed to accommodate the most explosive demand in voice and data communications that
the industry has seen over the last decade. This architecture will support the rapid
development and deployment of services by third party providers, which, combined with
customer demand, will drive the future evolution of the network. The platform will offer the venture's distributors, for
example, the world's best brokering/mediation services and protocols. This will allow
distributors and other partners to incorporate more service components from more
suppliers. The result: distributors can develop a broader base of offerings and customized
services, which in turn gives them a distinct competitive advantage. The venture's open IP platform will be software driven and
flexible enough to provide features and applications to customers, regardless of the
carrier who ultimately delivers it. This approach will free the venture from the
constraints and limitations of hardware and infrastructure investments. The platform will
unite the disparate elements that today make it difficult for legacy communications
systems to accommodate the need for flexible and sophisticated global services. This will
prove critical to meeting customer needs in a global industry where bandwidth and service
demands are exploding. Internet messaging services, for example, which barely existed 10
years ago, today boast traffic volumes that now exceed voice messaging services.
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AT&T and BT propose to merge all of their international gateway to gateway assets into a new global venture. The new venture will be responsible for integrating the current Concert and AT&T networks around the world, and for deploying the world's first next generation Internet Protocol (IP) platform, upon which a whole new range of advanced voice and data services will be offered. By establishing an open IP platform for rapid internal and third-party development, the venture will offer the most cost-effective and innovative voice and data services in the world.
Key aspects of the venture's technology story include:
The global venture, AT&T and BT will integrate their existing
international voice and data networks. The existing networks of all three companies are
known for their reliability, robustness, and customer support capabilities. By combining
their networks they will reduce cost, increase robustness, increase the ease of deployment
of customer services worldwide such as global call centers, virtual private networks,
frame relay and ATM, and provide for enhanced billing and customer services. AT&T and BT share a vision for an open IP platform as the
foundation for all future voice and data services. This is unique in the entire world
– no other telecommunications company has ever articulated a service strategy based
on software. The benefits of this approach: It's a customer-centric strategy. A standards-based platform
lends itself to rapid internal and third party development, empowering AT&T, BT, the
venture and partners to respond to changing customer needs and technological requirements
faster than ever before. It's a lot more cost effective to build new services on top of
an open software platform than it is to build new services on top of proprietary platforms
dependent on network hardware and facilities. These benefits can be passed along to the
customer. It's a lot easier for worldwide distributors and partners to
tap into the venture's network and services through open standard software and
interfaces than it is for these distributors to have to adapt their hardware and software
to another carrier's proprietary network and system. It's a lot easier for worldwide distributors to manage their
operations because the venture's open IP platform offers them the world's best
brokering/mediation services and protocols. This gives distributors and other partners the
ability to incorporate more service components from more suppliers, broadening their base
of offerings, enabling them to offer more customized services, and giving them a distinct
competitive advantage. AT&T has already developed an iteration of the venture's
future IP platform, so this platform isn't just a "vision," it's a
reality and its evolutionary process has already begun. It is in use not only within
AT&T, but by select universities in the U.S., and has been accepted as a key
contribution to the Internet 2 effort. The venture's open IP platform will be the
platform of choice for developing and deploying new global communications services
because: -- It will allow AT&T, BT and Concert to be among the foremost
providers of global end-to-end managed services; -- It takes advantage of AT&T, BT and Concert's superior
customer support capabilities and insight; -- It is being facilitated by a global network of distribution
partners and other carriers.
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The global venture's key objective will be to attain a leading position in IP-related services and networks. This includes the ability to set open APIs in the industry for a platform that would allow any customer of the partnership to create his own services, both local and global, and support innovative third-party application and service elements. In addition to support a range of customer to customer, customer to network provider and network provider to network provider relationships.
At the heart of the proposed approach is the definition of an open computing platform in the network, which could be used by the venture and by customers to create applications. The venture will seek to define the resulting APIs (including the necessary CPE application layers) in collaboration with suitable software partners and establish the venture as a world leader in this area.
To support this approach, the venture will deploy a core IP network and the necessary servers and OSS to manage, provision and operate the applications. In addition, the parents' own domestic networks (and those of their associated ventures) will provide the same capability within an overall co-operating architecture, thereby providing seamless global service. The core infrastructure will have the ability to scale up to a Terabit/second to 100 major cities of the world, by providing Terabit router cores in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific connected by owned submarine transmission facilities.
The new network and network platform will support services in the
following categories:
In addition, the venture's services will have extended reach,
support scaleable outsourcing of data and computing tasks, and will allow for exceptional
personalized and customized offerings. Demonstrating the flexibility of the platform (with
strengths based on open standards, modularity, and agnosticism) a range of services will
be offered on a wholesale basis to Internet Service Providers and other operators. Our Vision
of the Overall Service Experience The vision described here is initially targeted at the MNC market,
although we intend to develop the technology to allow a move to Small and Medium
Enterprises and individuals as required. In outline the overall service experience for the individual as part
of the MNC would be as follows:-
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The IP network will support an advanced distributed computing infrastructure providing the following application and service capabilities:
In a distributed global architecture where local operators may carry and control the local ends of global multinational services on their networks, there is the need to maintain and control global interoperability for seamless end-to-end management and control. The client/server nature of the information services on the internet require only basic address management. Future feature-rich large-scale peer-to-peer connectivity services will require higher-levels of interoperability or ‘brokering' across databases, management systems, and user logic. AT&T and Concert have experience of implementing ‘broker' interoperability with their partners in the conventional circuit-switched voice and data environments. The IP network, and its inherent distribution to the ‘edge', offers the opportunity to develop the distributed computing platform to support ‘broker' interoperability, particularly for voice and multimedia peer-to-peer telecomm services.
The operational support systems for provisioning, configuring and monitoring services will be directly accessible to customers and users via WEB-enabled interfaces. These systems will be logically integrated to provide an overall end-to-end view to the customer but the implementation will be distributed with personal service logic and data close to the user.
Many of the services and features identified in the previous section are, or will be available earlier in the LAN environment. However these implementations will generally not scale for the volumes, reach, robustness, ease of use and control in the wide area environment. The distributed applications and operations infrastructure will provide the scalability for carrier-strength quality of service.
Distributed Computing Paradigm
The IP protocol was originally designed as a computer to computer communications mechanism. Taking this together with developments in computing operating systems and databases for location transparency of software, and also the emerging distributed agent technologies to act on behalf of users, we have the opportunity to provide customizable applications and services independent of location, distance, migration and ownership.
Integrated Security & Authentication
An open network environment supporting mobility and cooperation of users must provide trustworthy and efficient security. To that end, we will provide an integrated and end-to-end security architecture, providing a number of key components including firewalls and packet filters, secure tunneling, encryption, certificates and key management, user directories and dynamic user and service tracking. These components will be based on best of breed open technology, providing an extensible framework for innovation and security policy alignment.
Open Standards & Third Party APIs
We expect IP-based services to continue to evolve. It is important that the network provides access to innovative third-party service providers to implement these services. While maintaining the security and reliability of the underlying network, we will be making APIs accessible and providing support for test and integration.
The API set would include a CPE-based API that would co-operate with the network to provide the overall applications. This would be Java-based and would need to be downloadable to standard CPE. This applet would include an open API that allows the customer or any third party to write his own applications.
Software tools to provide the ability for the customer to define his own services on our server and CPE APIs would be offered for the distribution, maintenance and operation of the service (including billing, provisioning etc if needed). This is both the provision and distribution of a set of software tools and the necessary customer support centers to support them. Customers will require access to the servers to download the applications. These servers would be constructed with a set of two APIs (and associated software tools) that are open to allow customers to create application software that runs in the network. One of these APIs would allow applications to be mounted in the network, the other allowing connection to the operator or customer operational support systems (OSS).
Quality of Service
Basic IP is a connectionless protocol that does not inherently provide assured quality of service for connection-oriented services such as telephony. Today, for example, IP telephony can be managed within the H.323 protocol and gatekeeper architecture but the quality and scalability is not carrier-strength. The network operating system will provide scalable, robust monitoring and management of call-oriented services on IP to a parameterized quality of service. Traffic levels and network delay and congestion will be controlled using a number of techniques, including policing at the edge of the network under intelligent control, class-based queuing and IETF Differential Services approaches, and bandwidth management in the core network.
The purpose of the Open IP Platform Architecture is to layout the structural underpinnings allowing the venture to create, deploy, monitor and manage an ever increasing number of services, some of which will need "ubiquitous access" and scaling. We present this platform's architecture as a set of horizontal layers, with the lowest creating enhanced capabilities over relatively standard IP (namely, the open and standard set of protocols, applications, and interoperable services as agreed upon by the IETF), and the highest implementing needed applications oriented features (e.g., billing, integrated customer information, offer management, etc.). Each of these "layers" defines a rigorous set of interfaces (so called APIs) used by its higher neighbor to access functionality that it creates and supports.
An important characteristic of such "layered" architectures, is the ability to innovate in parallel (e.g., "divide and conquer"). In fact, it should be possible to support different implementations of some of the layers, each following the specified interfaces that separate it from the layer above and from the layers below.
We have agreed on the logical architecture with 5 distinct elements
or layers. These are:
The Open IP Platform architecture defines functional characteristics
of its elements, as well as their interfaces and rules for putting them together into a
specific "open platform" based system. The overall Platform architecture has five major design goals:
Architecture The platform architecture supports several connection types of
traffic reaching its physical point of presence (POP), and supports both fixed and
dynamically assigned IP addresses. It is assumed that the connection is based on IP. All other
conversions (i.e. mobile wireless to IP, voice to IP) are done outside the open IP
platform part of physical POPs. It is further defined that all of the connections coming
out of the POP are IP based. These connections terminate in a Service Node.
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Service Nodes implement the three architectural layers: IP++, SOE, and AOE. In addition to other functionality, they act as a gateway to the backbone, which provides a high bandwidth/low latency IP transport to other Service Nodes and POPs.
There are some Service Nodes that are dedicated to the system monitoring and management purposes (systems like: Service Delivery and Management, Customer and Network Care Platforms). They are called Operations Data Centers or ODCs. ODCs may, or may not have POPs directly connected to them.
There are three distinct terminating subsystems: fixed IP, PPP and
voice connections. While they all receive separate inputs, their outputs are normalized to
IP and connected together into a related Service Node. These subsystems are:
Core Transport The core IP network will be based on Terabit router
technology. the venture will operate an ATM network in parallel to support existing
services such as frame relay and ATM services, and to provide bandwidth management for the
IP network where it makes sense to do so. However, we expect growth in the IP network to
be such that IP on SONET/SDH or IP on WDM may be more appropriate. Software Architectural Layer Definitions IP++ is an evolving set of protocols on top of basic TCP/IP,
providing QoS linkage (etc) to the higher layers. The network management functions to
provision maintain and control this IP++ will be developed to provide integrated
management and monitoring to ensure reliable, configurable communication. The purpose of the Service Operating Environment (SOE) layer is to
provide a common set of reusable functions on top of which both IP services and service
delivery and management applications can be built. Such services include membership
services, authentication, information security and integrity, certificate management,
access control, usage recording, active user and service registry, platform management,
and protocol mediation. The purpose of the Applications and Operations Environment (AOE)
layer is to provide end-user applications, along with the means to manage and maintain all
of the customer and business data across the entire platform. AOE is designed to support
any application via a generic set of interfaces, which provide access to a set of reusable
functions. In the near term the venture will continue to offer and enhance
existing Concert products by integrating AT&T's domestic and Concert's
global networks. Concert's platform technology will give the venture a significant
head start and lead, since it has demonstrated capabilities in scaling, security, support
for business operations, flexible rating and settlements, integrated information
architecture, and built-in support for brokering and mediation. Driving the deployment and implementation plans for the new IP
network and platform is the notion that it is to be comprised of proven technologies
derived to the extent possible from open and standard elements and components. We envision
the base level networking components to be obtained from a number of suppliers. Wherever
possible, service and application elements will be obtained or derived from the rapidly
innovating software marketplace. The venture has an aggressive plan for rapidly developing and
deploying the new network and systems, initially tailored to reach the 100 major worldwide
economic centers, allowing interworking with legacy services and facilitating customer
migration to the new. This global venture is about our joint attempt to emulate the power
of IP and to ride the innovative wave of the Internet. IP has cost performance
characteristics several orders of magnitude better than the classic world of
telecommunications. Open standards and the Internet have generated an amazing wealth of
innovative ideas in a remarkably short period of time. No single company is likely to be
able to succeed on its own ingenuity in the world just described. That the market place is
also demanding a global solution completes the challenge. We need to develop business and
technology partners fast. The venture will be our strategic foundation in this effort. To
that end, the venture's focus will be on interoperability: open standards and our
broker architecture are technology examples; wholesaling and attracting third party
applications and services are business examples. Interoperability also promises faster
times to market with improved overall reliability. With the strengths of the two partners
and the focus of our strategy, we will deliver on our vision.