NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: CAROLYN DUFFY MARSAN'S ISP NEWS REPORT
08/25/04
Today's focus:  Q&A: Allot exec predicts new demands for QoS

Dear [EMAIL PROTECTED],

In this issue:

* Trends in QoS systems deployment
* Links related to ISP News Report
* Featured reader resource
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This newsletter is sponsored by Alterpoint 

Read the latest analyst report on Network Change and 
Configuration Management (NCCM) written by EMA's Dennis 
Drogseth.  This report discusses the latest developments in the 
NCCM market, including an in-depth look at DeviceAuthority 
Suite, a comprehensive solution for configuring, changing, and 
controlling today's complex, multi-vendor IT network 
infrastructures.   Download the report today to learn how you 
can leverage NCCM to reduce the cost and complexity of managing 
network change. 
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Today's focus:  Q&A: Allot exec predicts new demands for QoS

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan

Allot Communications provides IP-based traffic management 
systems to ISPs and enterprises that want to optimize network 
bandwidth and support differentiated classes of service. In 
business since 1997, the Israel company has shipped more than 
10,000 systems to such heavy hitters as Verizon, British 
Telecom, Lowes and Starbucks.

I recently interviewed Azi Ronen, executive vice president of 
technology and marketing with Allot, about the trends he is 
seeing in the deployment of QoS systems. Here are excerpts from 
our telephone conversation:

Q. What new features or capabilities are you adding to your 
products?

In the enterprise world, there is a constant effort to improve 
and add support for more protocols and more sophistication in 
the way we analyze protocols. One big example of this is in the 
area of peer-to-peer traffic. The ever-changing peer-to-peer 
environment requires us to assign a team of people to follow the 
peer-to-peer world and see all of the new changes, such as the 
recent decrease in Kazaa traffic and the increase in BitTorrent 
traffic. We have to follow these trends and adapt to them.

We used to analyze peer-to-peer traffic using TCP headers and 
later application signatures, but now with some protocols this 
is not enough. Some applications use encryption, and you need 
more sophisticated ways to understand that a certain application 
is [peer-to-peer traffic].

The other aspect of advancement is in traffic monitoring and 
reporting. It turns out that many customers are using our 
systems not only for QoS or traffic management, but to 
understand what's going on in their networks. You can't really 
assign a policy to manage your traffic if you don't understand 
what traffic is on your network. For that we provide real-time 
monitoring and longer-term historical analysis. We have over 100 
graphs that allow you to understand what the applications are up 
to Layer 7 and understand who are the top users.

Q. What trends are you seeing among your enterprise customers?

One trend that we see is [Multi-protocol Label Switching]. We 
see more and more enterprise networks using MPLS services from 
their carriers. MPLS replaces the older frame relay 
infrastructures. We do not yet see the carriers taking advantage 
of the lower levels of granularity of MPLS. Customers might be 
able to get differentiation between voice and data from the 
carrier, but they can't get differentiation between particular 
data applications.

Q. How about your ISP customers? What trends are you seeing 
there?

Smaller providers - those that don't have their own backbones - 
want to reduce their operating costs. They're doing this mostly 
by reducing the bandwidth available for peer-to-peer 
applications. Or they offer service plans that provide a certain 
amount of peer-to-peer traffic to subscribers.

We see both DSL and cable carriers wanting to deploy a service 
control environment to a much higher granularity. The goal is to 
generate more revenue and to increase the average revenue per 
user. One of the examples is what [carriers] call a service 
boost, which is the ability of the subscriber to click on a 
button and get additional bandwidth for a short period of time 
to, say, watch a movie. If [the user] does that two or three 
times during the month, the carrier gets incremental revenues 
from that.

Carriers are also interested in quota-based accounting. We see 
some ISPs with policies that say subscribers may download all 
the peer-to-peer material as they wish but uploading is limited. 
Other ISPs are watching how much traffic subscribers can 
initiate so they can control or stop denial of service attacks. 
All of these new services stem from traffic monitoring and 
understanding what's going on in your networks.

Q. What impact will VoIP have on the demand for traffic 
management products in enterprise and ISP networks?

In the enterprise, we believe that more and more organizations 
will be implementing converged networks of data and voice. 
They're going to need some kind of control equipment to ensure 
that the VoIP quality will be similar to what they expect to 
have in the PSTN or a separate dedicated VoIP network.

On the service provider side, we see the desire for cable 
operators and others to prioritize their own VoIP services over 
alternative services. They don't like to see people using the 
VoIP services of other providers that anyone can use without a 
special configuration. The recent introduction of a PC-to-phone 
service by Skype may be the first time that a general Internet 
solution is considered by many service providers as a threat to 
their own services.

What DSL and cable operators will do about these VoIP services I 
can't really say. But the basic requirement is for equipment to 
be able to classify traffic like Skype or Vonage and have 
billing mechanisms or QoS mechanisms do something about them. I 
have no idea about the legality of this issue, but we do see 
ISPs thinking about this issue and asking about our equipment.

Q. What can I expect to see from Allot during the rest of this 
year?

You will see higher capacity. We will continue the trend that we 
started at the gigabit level. You will see more centralized 
management capabilities. That's really all I can say now.

Go to <http://www.allot.com/>  to learn more about Allot.
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Carolyn Duffy Marsan

Carolyn Duffy Marsan is a senior editor with Network World and 
covers emerging Internet technologies and standards. Reach her 
at <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Alterpoint 

Read the latest analyst report on Network Change and 
Configuration Management (NCCM) written by EMA's Dennis 
Drogseth.  This report discusses the latest developments in the 
NCCM market, including an in-depth look at DeviceAuthority 
Suite, a comprehensive solution for configuring, changing, and 
controlling today's complex, multi-vendor IT network 
infrastructures.   Download the report today to learn how you 
can leverage NCCM to reduce the cost and complexity of managing 
network change. 
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=73273
_______________________________________________________________
ARCHIVE LINKS

Archive of the ISP News Report newsletter (formerly Internet 
Services):
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