Telstra and Juniper trial the Internet of the future

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 09:53

Business IT - Technology

The Internet today is a 'best effort' service but the IPsphere Forum has been developing a set of specifications that will enable services to be delivered across different interconnected networks with guaranteed grades of service - for a fee - and Telstra is taking part in the first multi-site trial of this framework using technology from Juniper Networks and others.

Telstra's trial network will be interconnected with similar trial networks built by Norwegian telco, Telenor, Deutsche Telekom and Telus for a global demonstration of the IPsphere Forum framework being staged as part of the TM Forum Management World, being held in Orlando, Florida this week. (The IPsphere Forum merged with the TM (TeleManagement) Forum earlier this year.)

The IP Sphere Forum was created in mid 2005 by almost 40 companies - a who's who of global network equipment manufacturers and major carriers - with the ambitious goal of developing a new architecture for IP networks. It grew out of the Infranet Initiative, set up in 2003 by Juniper Networks, which in turn spawned the Infranet Initiative Council (IIC).

The key aim of the IPsphere Forum is to produce a specification that, when implemented in network hardware, software and management systems, will enable multiple parties responsible for creating and delivering a network service from end to end to put in place the technical and commercial arrangements to deliver that service at agreed quality levels and to charge accordingly. The Forum took its first significant step towards achieving this goal with release the first version of its technical specification in mid 2007.

According to Tom Noelle CEO of CIMI Corporation, a consultant who has been closely involved with the IPsphere Forum over several years, "'Every service provider in the world is looking for a standardised way to abstract service components, compose services across partner boundaries, and control service lifecycle processes using software.

"It's a recognised path to profit that raises revenues and manages cost. IPsphere is perhaps the standards-based approach that's most fully developed, and this demonstration proves it."

For Telstra participation in the trial is an important step in its plan to develop an 'Application Assured Network' (AAN) - a network capable of dynamically dimensioning itself to support any customer application requirement, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter and QoS.
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