Applications

Even U.S. Carriers Might Deploy Services

A manufacturer of carrier-class application management systems says this might be the year the U.S. deploys—but if not, the company should look for customers in smaller, local broadband networks.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [May 27, 2004]

"We're bullish on our opportunities this year in the U.S.," says Yuval Shahar, CEO of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based P-Cube. For years, he notes, the U.S. incumbents have been focused on migrating their users to broadband while services such as games and VoIP were being deployed in Europe and Asia.

Now that might change. "Even the U.S. is moving forward, finally," he says.

Think of the company's SE2000 as a multi-gigabit hardware version of a 56 Kbps dialup accelerator, and you've got part of the story. The device tracks applications and makes sure sessions remain live without being broken.

But it also enables real-time billing, usage tracking, traffic shaping, and more.

"People are asking how to do services," says Shahar. "We're it."

Relaxing on the Plala
If you want to see the sort of IP environment that P-Cube is built for, look no further than Japanese incumbent NTT East's ISP, Plala.

You can rent content (full length DVDs) for one week for ¥315, about $3. A wide variety of content, sorted by genre, is available on the ISP's content site, Plala.tv.

The company's portal, goo, offers a wide variety of reference material, including dictionaries, news, and provides shopping through affiliate relationships with major retailers such as HMV Japan for music (where CDs sell for about $30 each, the retail price in Japan).

There's a lot more there as well, including online customer help.

In the U.S., the company is targeting broadband carriers. In theory metro Ethernet providers would be good customers, if they had any money, but they don't. "Metro Ethernet providers are not buying," says Shahar. "There's no 100 box rollout out there."

For U.S. incumbents, P-Cube expects to enable simpler services than those offered by Plala, such as prepaid temporary speed boosts for gaming, or prepaid VoIP service, explains Milind Gadekar, P-Cube vice president of marketing.

It's all based on the company's software, which allows ISPs to build event triggers, define service behavior, maintain connections and states, and track usage for billing. "We created a layer to make sure that things just work," explains Shahar. "We can do SIP, H.323, describe a game, run Video on Demand, or maintain IM."

Some P-Cube customers have already used the company's software in ways the designers had never anticipated. ISPs that offer reduced rate access for PDAs use P-Cube to check that someone with a PDA account doesn't use it to hook up their laptop. Others offer special photo accounts, to be used to upload images. Even photo accounts tend to have lower bandwidth usage than a laptop, and can be offered at a discount.

Security for fun and profit
But P-Cube's not just selling services. The company is touting its security features as well. The company recently added basic DoS protection that, for example, limits the number of sessions per second and closes sessions that produce more than one SYN (SYN floods).

The company detects zombies and redirects a zombie computer's browser to a Web page describing the infection and what a user should do about it.

"These are the first of many security-related enahancements," says Shahar.

It's all part of the inevitable service-laded path to carrier profits. Shahar says there's a convergence between wired and wireline services, by which he means that carriers are using lessons learned in wireless networks to charge for services provided to wireline customers, and that providers are using security lessons learned in wireline networks to fight threats that are new to wireless networks.

But Shahar foresees real convergence. "The incumbents are looking at an access-rich platform. There will be one interface across all access technologies.

Agrees Gadekar, "they will provide any customer any service over any access type and accept any payment."

This could happen, even in the U.S. But this kind of innovation never starts with the incumbent. Even in Japan, it was driven by competition.

Without competition, the U.S. incumbents will have no incentive to roll out services. Perhaps, much to his own surprise, Shahar will find customers in local fiber networks, customers who will find P-Cube since P-Cube is not seeking them at the moment.

— End