Japan's NTT shows the way forward

Just got back from a week in Langkawi, where NetEvents held two conferences back to back.

We were billeted in The Andaman, a large, low-rise hotel snuggled down between the rain-forest and the beach adjoining the bath-warm Andaman Sea. It’s almost invisible until you’re on top of it, and the location, the local wildlife and, above all, the incomparable desire of the people to make your stay a memorable one combine to make it a great venue. Oh yes, and the warm tropical weather...

The first of the two conferences was the company’s inaugural summit meeting for service providers in the Asia Pacific region, which allowed SPs to meet each other to share best practices. It’s an event without parallel, according to the SPs, who were glad of an opportunity to talk to each other without the paraphernalia of a big exhibition.

NetEvents is all about meeting and talking, and that’s what happened at both events, the second being all about the more familiar meeting of vendors and press.

Service providers are often difficult to get in touch with, and I learnt a lot from this valuable opportunity to listen and talk to them. Among the most interesting presentations both to me and to most of the 60 or so attendees I spoke to was the one by Hiromichi Shinohara, from Japan’s biggest telco, NTT.

Here we learnt more about the company’s launch of its award-winning next-generation network or NGN -- alleged to be the first of its kind in the world. It’s analogous to BT’s 21st century network (universally known as 21CN), which has just been officially launched, and offers fibre to the home, which of course enables high-speed broadband access. However, BT's 21CN doesn’t enable fibre to the home but is instead an IP-based backbone network that in the main connects exchanges.

To give you an idea of how advanced NTT's network is, compare most western countries’ ADSL profile, and you’ll find that it’s growing. In the UK, for example, over half the country’s homes now have ADSL-provided broadband access to the Internet. Incumbent telco BT routinely dishes out press releases trumpeting another half-million homes connected -- see here for an example.

By comparison, NTT is way ahead. For example, numbers of Japanese users of ADSL technology, which was once described as an interim technology until we get to universal fibre-connectivity, have been declining. Instead, users are switching to fibre as an access mechanism.

This means NTT reckons it can deliver richer services, for which it can charge more. For example, it plans to offer videophone services, HDTV, video-conferencing and a range of both consumer and enterprise-focused multimedia services. As a result, NTT has been able to increase its average revenue per user or ARPU, a common metric for measuring a telco’s financial performance.

It’s routine for industry observers and analysts to argue that telcos such as BT and NTT ought to add more value to their fat pipes by providing services if they’re to remain profitable in a world where broadband prices fall as demand sky-rockets. If you look at the agenda for the service provider summit, that’s the issue which recurs throughout the event. However, the telcos have not, broadly speaking, been very successful at doing so, often because their networks cannot yet support services such as video on demand. NTT appears to be an exception to this long-standing industry mantra.

While NTT may be first to launch an NGN, depending on how you define “first”, what most at the NetEvents SP summit found interesting is the way that NTT is opening up its network for others to build on by providing a service delivery platform. as part of this process, it set up a forum for third party service providers. In this way, it helps to ensure that service providers help generate revenue for NTT, as well as for themselves. This kind of double-sided business model is one that many telcos are looking at -- and an issue, incidentally, that NetEvents TV will be examining in a future feature.

I hasten to add that I haven’t tasted NTT’s NGN, so have only Shinohara-san’s words to go on. But if the words are translated into reality, then NTT’s model is one that telcos elsewhere might do well to emulate.

The inexorable march of Ethernet

This, my first blog for NetEvents TV, is going to be a bit of a personal journey so please bear with me.

An IT journalist for over 20 years, communications has always been a fascinating topic. There's so much to go wrong it remains a source of amazement that it all works.

So little time ago, the loading of a network stack filled the PC's memory to the point where there was just enough room to run a stripped down word processor and that was it. Everything was manual. You had to tweak the various elements that talked to the hardware, the bit in the middle known as a shim, and then hope and pray that your application would tolerate the existence of a location that wasn't on the local machine. If not, it was game over, and the machine would just freeze, and it was time for the BRS - or big red switch.

And each vendor had their own way of doing things. Hoping that Novell's stack would talk to IBM's or DEC's was pushing your luck. Assuming, that is, that the thick yellow, 10Base5 Ethernet cable or, later, the thinner, 10 Base2 BNC cable hadn't been unplugged by someone who didn't realise that doing so would bring down the entire network.

And wireless connectivity was a black art, of use only to those who absolutely had to have it, such as people who work in warehouses and hospitals. For the rest of us, it was way too arcane and expensive.

Fast forward to 2008 and things could hardly be more different. Broadly speaking, networking just works. You plug in the cable or fire up the Wi-Fi and it connects.

Everything is standardised, whether you're using a phone, a laptop running Linux, a PC or a Mac. It's taken some doing but the extent to which a TCP/IP stack is now just a TCP/IP stack as opposed to being a product to which vendors insist on adding value by making it non-standard are - thankfully - long gone.

Where am I going with this? It's simply a paean of praise for those who dragged the technology to the point where it is today: among them are the engineers who did the hard work of making it so, the users who insisted with their wallets that vendors interoperate, and the standards bodies who created the detail that makes the interconnected world we now inhabit possible. And there's a big debate going on as to whether it ought to be the same stuff that connects the Earth to future space missions too.

So when you click on a link that connects you halfway across the globe to a server that contains the info you want, think for a second about the magic that makes it work -- and, if your character allows it, marvel at the technology.