While a great deal of attention has recently been paid to the enormous amount of change that is taking place at the edge of the network with smartphones, tablets, apps, Web2.0 etc, massive changes are also underway on the network side. The current network has been designed over a period of thirty years and it is due for a serious overhaul to keep abreast of changes in the industry in general.

This new environment is loosely termed NGN (next generation networks).

Irish company Intune Networks is at the forefront of these developments. It has been redesigning the seven-layered OSI model, moving away from a centralised structure and collapsing a seven-layered network down to 2.5 layers. In this way it has built a flat and ultrafast network that is managed through standard web services, making the network dynamic and excellent for virtualised service delivery.

In scaled deployment the network will function like the Apple apps community—all users will develop and configure their own services over a bandwidth-on-demand network, with integrated real-time billing and a very high QoE (quality of experience) for video-centric services, irrespective of access type: fibre, WiFi or LTE.

In simple terms, the core architectural difference is that, rather than bringing all traffic to the centre of a network for distribution, Intune keeps the vast majority of traffic processing at the edge of the network. The new network is therefore highly efficient, perfect for heavy bursts of video traffic, and helps carriers to dramatically reduce their CAPEX/OPEX and power footprint.

Intune’s lead customers are Verizon and Telefonica. Verizon is by far the most advanced when it comes to understanding all the new video/cloud services that can be delivered with Intune. Commercial labs trials are underway and field trials in New York and Miami will follow in late 2012. The company is also active in Australia with Telstra, where they are moving into the same stage of relationship as Telefonica. Telstra is, of course, spurred on with the NBN developments in this country and is well advanced in technical innovation.

The next frontier is to understand all the application scenarios in relation to content delivery, video-on-demand and distributed management solutions—linked to data centre interconnect solutions.