Webinar: Secure and Scale the Gi-LAN at 80% Lower TCO

Mobile network traffic is expected to increase 45% annually with video representing 60% of all mobile traffic. To meet the demand, networks will need to be intelligently and cost effectively scaled for secure services delivery, especially the Gi-LAN. As volumes grow, the number of concurrent users, connection rates, and throughput will all need to scale together. But how can operators evolve their architectures to support this growth while lowering TCO?

Join F5‘s Misbah Mahmoodi, and ACG’s Paul Parker-Johnson and register for this webinar to learn about:

• The market and business challenges IoT devices, applications and the growing number of users are placing on mobile networks.
• The key criteria to use when architecting for massive scale in application delivery infrastructures.
• Three TCO sizing models you can reference to dimension our network performance needs.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

www.acgcc.com

Evolution of Mobile Network Visibility: ACG HotSeat with Sanjay Munshi, Brocade

Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management at Brocade Communications, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay highlights the challenges operators have in 4G/LTE visibility, how to address them in a cost effective manner and the critical need for new, next-generation network visibility architectures as mobile operators ramp up to virtual EPC and 5G with billions of M2M connections and Internet of Things in the not too distant future.

Click for more information about ACG’s video packages.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Most IoT Industry Narratives Are Wrong!

Yes, it’s true; Internet of Things (IoT) is caught up in the whirlwind of hype, exuberance and outright giddiness. It will be a sad day when neophyte IoT enthusiast wake up and realize this. You can’t blame the younger crowd from behaving this way as it’s probably their first tech hype cycle (documented by The Gartner Hype Cycle). Anyone over 30, however, should know better. 

Hype cycles are a fun ride and ironically, many entities and people make a lot of money in the exuberant whirlwind as enthusiast entrepreneurs and innovation ecosystem participants race to be part of next unicorn or the next Google, Facebook, etc. The first to make money are the highly respected market research firms. It’s a $9 trillion dollar market, no it’s a $14 trillion market, no wait let’s call it the Internet of Everything and call it an $18 trillion market. If it’s everything why is it only $18 trillion. The first question to ask them is “are you sure it’s not $14.7652497 trillion?” Guess their dart board doesn’t have that kind of resolution. Yet, people buy these reports to show internal and external investment sources that their idea is a slam dunk. Ten percent market share is still $1.4 billion dollars, right.

The next to make money in hype cycles are the trade show and conference companies. There are global, national and regional IoT conferences every month. Companies pay to speak to position themselves as thought leaders and people pay to attend to get smart. Note to self, next time I pay a hard-earned dollar to attend an IoT event please assess me with a $1,000 stupidity tax. The topics covered in these shows haven’t evolved in two to three years. By the way, in a few years there WILL NOT be IoT conferences as the topics will be covered in the appropriate vertical market conference: cloud, big data and analytics.

These two early money makers are what’s driving the erroneous narrative of IoT. Why is it wrong? Let’s take an end-to-end view of a solution utilizing IoT technologies (note phrasing). First, we’ll normalize the intelligence throughout the system to 100. The current narrative looks at the IoT equation as this:

In many discussions even Ithing is extremely small and most of the intelligence is located in the cloud and includes “big data” and “analytics.” Isn’t there a glaring omission in this narrative formula? By this definition Inetwork is zero:

Thus, the network must be always there, instantly accessible and, of course, free. The current narratives imply that network intelligence is zero. Isn’t the “I” in IoT the “Internet”? Perhaps for many IoT enthusiast the network is zero since they don’t care about:

1. Cost of transmission (it’s not always free)

2. Cost and power consumption of the modem/radio in the thing

3. Bit rates: maximum, minimum, average peak, average, symmetry (upstream/downstream)

4. Distance verse throughput

5. Latency, round trip delay, connection set up time.

6. Jitter, congestion, dropped packets, availability,

7. Security

There are many markets under the IoT hype umbrella (note phrasing again) where the network can be zero. However, for most markets the network cannot be a ZERO! The correct formula and the correct industry narrative is:

It’s open to an interesting discussion of how the 100 units of intelligence are distributed. Yet, one thing we know for certain is:

Therefore, service providers (telco, cable, wireless) need to take action to change the industry narrative or risk becoming a commodity bit pipe providers. The longer Inetwork is zero the more challenging it will be to overcome this perception. Networking solution vendors need to actively participate in changing this narrative as well or they risk selling commodity solutions to the commodity bit pipe providers.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail contact Greg at gwhelan@acgcc.com.

Greg Whelan
gwhelan@acgcc.com
acgcc.com

Five Lessons Equipment Providers Learned from Deploying IoT Solutions

Dennis Ward discusses five lessons the equipment providers have learned form deploying Internet of Things solutions. He talks about horizontal platforms, end-to-end solutions, subscriber-based billing models and security.

Click to read the entire blog.

Click for more information about ACG’s IoT services.

Dennis Ward

dward@acgcc.com

acgcc.com

Verizon: Are Your Future Looking Binoculars Blurry?

The trillion dollar global service provider industry is in a transformative phase. Mega mergers, hyper competition from new, nimble entrants and regulators stuck in a backwards looking time warp are just a few change vectors colliding in this big bang that are affecting carriers and vendor alike.

It’s becoming more challenging for carriers to differentiate bit transport, and they are actually accelerating this by aggressively marketing bits per second. Also, service providers are losing the narrative in IoT where the discussions are all about “the cloud” and “the thing.” Where’s the network in the narrative? Nowhere, hence it must be always there and free of course.

Forward looking service provider management teams with a good pair of future gazing binoculars realize the future is fixed and wireless access. It’s all about connecting people and things to the cloud and to each other regardless of what access network technology they are using. They want to keep people on their network, keep the billing meter running and control the user’s experience. Wireless companies that see this are buying fixed network operations, and fixed network operators are looking to add wireless technologies and services to leverage their embedded assets and subscribers.

Then there is Verizon. Fixed networks are more challenging to build and operate. Did Verizon get tired of getting dirty climbing utility poles and digging up streets? Or did they get tired of antiquated regulations, community quid pro quo (for example, kickbacks), inflexible unions and onerous pension obligations? In any case, they’ve been jettisoning fixed network operations for a while. The company sold Vermont and New Hampshire to Fairpoint and wire line assets in Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin to Frontier. Are they paying now for investing in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH, FiOS) too soon? A decade too soon? 

Currently, and for the last 10 years mobile network operators (MNO) have been on a rocket ship of revenue, profit and market sex appeal. However, new, serious threats are emerging: cable voice-over-Wi-Fi and OTT voice and SMS (for example, WhatsApp). This wireless booster rocket is running out of fuel. and MNOs need to jettison this stage of the rocket and start the next rocket or they will level off and at best be stuck in low orbit or worse crash back to earth. What this rocket will look like is anyone’s guess. Yet, it’s a safe bet it will be a combination of 5G, massive IoT AND fixed networks.

Thus, if Verizon’s strategy is to become a global Tier 2 or 3 wireless-only carrier they are on the right track. Perhaps all Verizon needs to do is to use a bit of glass cleaner on their binoculars?

Click for more information about Greg Whelan.

Greg Whelan
gwhelan@acgcc.com
acgcc.com

Small Cells: Ideal for Smart City Applications

“Digital urbanism” is rapidly becoming a central pillar for urban planners, technology architects, developers, and transportation providers, as well as in public service provision. For the last two years the UK has been pushing its smart cities concept and testing applications in collaboration with vendors and is, consequently, becoming an innovative test bed for smart applications. City councils throughout the countries are considering new high-capacity wireless and optical networks to efficiently support a wider range of end-user’ needs. The smart cities of the future could offer ultra-low latency connectivity for driverless cars, kilobits per second connectivity for machine to machine sensors to monitor the health of citizens with long-term chronic conditions, hundred megabits per second for ultra high-definition TV broadcasts, video surveillance and terabits per second data transfers for collaborative research and development programs between global universities.

Universities, which are a good place to look for future trends, are pushing hard to become “mini cities” and are frequently early adopters of smart city technology. One such example of “mini cities” is the University of Bristol, Cambridge, where staff is adding the new public platforms with the assistance of several vendors, such as NEC and Cisco. With small cells these “mini cities” could be easily rescaled to larger ones as they can effectively satisfy the requirement of a carrier-grade, high- capacity transport network in the urban environment.

The smart city technology architecture when boosted by the small cells should be able to deliver the following benefits:

• Simplicity and availability. End-to-end IP, high bandwidth guarantees high service quality and relatively low maintenance.
• Security. IP security mechanisms ensure a highly robust and resilient system.
• Multiservice. Solutions should place equal importance on data, voice, video, and sensors.
• Technological scalability. The new architecture should be designed to handle the large number of connected “things.”
• Business scalability. Solution should offer “pay-per-use” opportunities to enhance granularity so that it can be scaled as budgets allow.
• Manageability. The end-to-end nature of the solution makes maintenance easier by enabling greater visibility into the infrastructure.
• Flexibility. The architecture allows city managers and citizens to utilize the same services and information for their specific needs.

For more information about Elias Aravantinos click here.

 

    

    Elias Aranvantino

    earanvantino@acgcc.com

    www.acgcc.com

Is API Regulation the Future of Information Security?

Recently, I listened in on an IEEE-SA sponsored roundtable at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on April 22, 2015. Karen McCabe, IEEE-SA senior director, Technology Policy and International Affairs, lead a discussion on whether Application Programming Interface (API) regulation is necessary for the future of information security. Participants were Bret Hartman, VP and CTO, Security Business Group, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Cooper Quintin, staff technologist, Electronic Frontier Foundation; Monique Morrow, CTO, evangelist, New Frontiers Development and Engineering, Cisco Systems, Inc.; Hadi Narhari, chief security architect, NVIDIA; Rob Zazueta, Director Platform Strategy, Mashery (Intel); Matt McLarty, VP, The API Academy, CA Technologies; and moderator Kimball Brown, Independent Technology Consultant.

What is an Application Programmable Interface (API)? In its native form, APIs are building blocks for developers to construct programs. APIs often come in the form of a library that includes specifications for routines, data structures, object classes and variables. In other cases an API is simply a specification of remote calls exposed to the API consumers (for example, JSON and REST). These APIs are used primarily for many of the virtualized functions/service programs we are seeing on the market today. Think of a remote controlled robot on a manufacturing floor, a virtual network function in a switch or your favorite application on your cell phone that accesses the sensor on your wrist that monitors your heart or on a macroscopic scale, the billions of devices that are forecasted to exist via the Internet Of Things (IoT) and the programs to control them. All of these programs will rely on APIs in their development. Imagine if a rogue hacker tried to manipulate these programs via accessible APIs to cause harm? There lies the issue. How can this be avoided? What is the state of protection now? And where does this responsibility lie?

The panel agreed that there needs to be more education given to developers on building security into their initial designs, possibly implementing an attack tree or use case security framework from which to build. This framework should be transparent to the consumer because this structure should not impede on the go-to-market strategies that affect the bottom line. Although the panel agreed that this would be a good idea, because there are so many types of APIs, there is no standard way to implement this. As for IoT, the development environment is not like a static information technology environment where the attack points are relatively predictable. IoT environments, in many cases, will be mobile, personal and limited in memory space for which traditional security measures cannot be used. The threat model will have to be redefined, which has yet to happen. Once one is established this model should be communicated to developers as well as consumers.

Panel member also discussed a universal consortium establishing standards and if this would help the problem? The answer was a little but it would not fully address the problem, because the market pace and demand will be too fast for standardization groups to react. One thought was to develop an emerging new API platform with proper hooks and external partners buying into the model. This thought spurred an interesting conversation dealing with the integrity of the partners in the joint venture. How credible are they? This led quickly into the examples of Target, Snapchat and J.P Morgan/Chase where the weak link was the integrity of the partner and not necessarily the flaw of an API, underscoring that business partners having a stake in the level of security that is needed. This led to an interesting discussion concerning Person Area Networks (PAN) where the person becomes the API. Would a developer, consumer or human PAN bill of rights help? Again a “one-size-fits-all” constitution would be tough because every person has his or her own view of what personal security means? It would be hard for a government or business to enforce such a constitution. Businesses do not want regulation to hinder innovation or sales.

The discussion concluded with the final question of how APIs will look in 10 years? All panelists agreed that presently APIs are in a single-user mode and need to move toward a distributed model. Higher levels of SDKs need to be implemented. APIs should have a different paradigm for deployment such that devices, services and systems govern themselves. For example, applications should automatically inform the API what it can and cannot do during processes. For IoT, this method will allow better integration between devices, reduce human regulation policies and thus optimize security.

Click for more information about Dennis Ward.

 

     Dennis Ward

     dward@acgcc.com

     acgcc.com

 

Internet of Things Makes a Showing at the CES 2015

Invited by the IEEE-SA to participate on a panel called the “IEEE IoT Soiree,” I recently had the pleasure of attending my first CES show. Our panel critiqued a few startups in the IoT space (http://ces.ieeesa-events.org/). A key take-away from this event was that investors are really actively not investing in IoT, but investors seem to be looking for companies that will change the way people do things and enhance their lives. The products must have a strong lifestyle changing effect. The startups that were presented centered on edge devices, but some may be service provider worthy and turned into a viable service business. Cisco panelist Maciej Kranz said that the industrial IoT is where the money is, but enterprises are still fearful of taking the leap because of unknown security issues and unsubstantiated return on investments. Although true, there are sustainable IoT designed to show sustainable IoT scenarios and businesses that service providers can leverage. Another take-away centered on how to stimulate enterprises to embrace IoT and use the solutions for their own benefits.

 

After the event I began my exploration. This was the first time I attended the CES event and it was impressive. However my first impression was “crowded”! Why? This year the convention—the largest CES to date with more exhibition space than last year—hosted 170,000 people and about 3,600 exhibitors. The event was distributed between two convention centers and hotels throughout the Las Vegas strip.  However, it was organized with themed areas, for example, fitness, wearables, privacy, home security, and branded aisles showcasing French, Israeli, Korean and Chinese technology. The exhibit locations were itemized into product categories such as 3D printing, digital Imaging/Photography, online media and wireless devices and services.

There were plenty of commercial products with IoT solutions or marketing touting “connected” devices as well as wearable watches and fitbit-like devices. Mind control products, using the frontal lobe, were quite intriguing.  3D video experiences were also popular (via TV, glasses for gaming, etc.). I was particularly interested in the health, biotech and wearables areas, promising for service providers (thank goodness they were close together!). See forecast (link to press release). One example of cutting-edge connect solution development was exhibited by Jeff Li, vice president of iHealth, http://community.ihealthlabs.com/Protals/Home.aspx, who mentioned that it is now building out a cloud service aimed at service providers . 

The event although overwhelming, it did reinforce that IoT can be a viable service business once providers figure out how to address the market, security issues and prove return on investments. But if you plan to go to CES 2016 my advice is to invest in good, comfortable shoes because you will be walking for miles!

For more information about ACG's IoT services contact sales@acgcc.com.

Dennis Ward

dward@acgresearch.net

acgcc.com

IoT Offers Opportunity for Service Providers and Vendors

The Internet of Things (IoT) market opportunity across the cellular network will be worth $138.4 billion by 2018 with a compound annual growth rate of 33.2 percent. The key service provider verticals are connected car, home, industrial IoT, utilities, and wearable technology. The market is very fragmented with many players from a wide range of industries; however, each has fundamental approaches. Industry standards bodies and consortiums, such as OneM2M, IEEE-SA, ITU-T and IIC, are working on setting a single set of core standards to guide the industry.

All equipment providers are striving to position themselves as key vendors though at present no one has a complete solution. Ericsson, Cisco, ALU and recently Intel have horizontal IoT platform solutions that address early and late SP adopters. Ericsson leads the EP platform sales with total 1Q14 and 2Q14 revenue of $26.7 billion.

Service providers are a key part of the IoT value chain. However, to be successful, ACG recommends that SPs continue building out their core infrastructures by focusing on the common service entity functions: BSS/OSS, provisioning management, policy management, reporting management, data management, security management/governance and diagnostics.

Use cases are the best way to validate IoT implementations. For SPs, use cases that yield the most value have the following attributes: highly managed, mission critical, life dependent, warrant high liability, and regulatory constraints.

Click for more information about Dennis Ward.

For more information about the forecast contact sales@acgcc.com.

Dennis Ward

dward@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch

Demand for All Things Video, the Implications

Although video has transformed public and private networks and continues to drive network deployments it also dwarfs all other network traffic types, for example, Netflix can account for upwards of 40 percent of local Internet traffic. The massive amount of bandwidth required drives the need for capacity in all parts of the end-to-end network. If you solve this problem for video all other traffic, voice, email, web and even IoT benefits as well.  

Consumers have an unending appetite for all things video. They are watching TV shows, movies, YouTube, Vines, Facetime or Skype on every device they have. Advertisers are increasingly moving to video ads and away from static banners. Truly live TV is exclusively sports and news. Appointment TV is a thing of the past. Everything is becoming on demand.

The implications of these trends cannot be underestimated. Not only do they impact all aspects of the telecommunication and Internet ecosystem, they impact the movie and television industries in a major transformation way. As these businesses struggle to adapt to overwhelming innovative forces they only know one thing for certain: They don’t want video assets to go the way of music.

Service providers, facing a hypercompetitive zero-sum market, are attempting to adapt and upgrade their physical networks, data center, core, metro and access to support video traffic. The race to 1Gbps per home is well underway. Back office systems are adapting as well. Marketing departments are creating new service bundles with higher data caps and source funded noncap traffic, such as taking an order to sending a bill, all of which need to be supported. Legal departments are impacted too. Issues such as net neutrality, asymmetrical interconnects, must carry and spectrum acquisition are just of few of the array of legal issues facing service providers globally.

Mobile operators are in no way immune from video. As they address their coverage and capacity issues video traffic is front and center. More smart phones mean more handheld video screens, which use more bandwidth and have much longer connection times. Here too, all aspects of the mobile operators business are impacted. Small cell deployments, WiFi integration and SON plus the emerging requirements of 5G must address the demand for video.

Video might just be a lot of ones and zeros, but the impact of massive amounts of video is disrupting the entire telecommunication industry. It is safe to say that decisions made by the entire ecosystem, service providers, equipment vendors, software vendors, semiconductor vendors, must address the onslaught of video traffic.

Click here for press release information about Greg Whelan. 

Greg Whelan

gwhelan@acgresearch.net

acgresearch.net

IoT B2B Ecosystem: How Can SPs Retain Their Maximum Share?

The OneM2M joint standards groups partition the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem by access domain, network domain and application domain. Within these domains the service providers (SP), specifically wireless SPs, are in the network domain and are responsible for the operational and business system services of the devices (OSS/BSS), for example, SIM provisioning, monitoring and management of the device over the “air,” routing traffic from the device to backend systems and applications or to other devices in the network, billing and recording of device activity based on bandwidth usage or further analytics associated with the application deployed. In a legacy machine to machine (M2M) scenario the value chain for the SP was clear; however, with the new IoT ecosystem this and business models have changed. How can SPs obtain the most value and retain reasonable financial margins within today’s IoT ecosystem?

Traditional M2M Business Models

Established M2M business models, which are limited in scope and structured, were quite clear and the revenue share among the domains was evenly distributed and predictable. Leading SP network operation field specialists acknowledge that the device provider, network provider and the application provider each receive one-third of the revenue.  A customer would request a defined service, such as a fleet/asset tracking service, from the service provider who most likely had a purpose-built solution. Depending on the quantity of assets that needed to be tracked, the service provider would know precisely how many unintelligent devices and SIMs to purchase from his device supplier, servers from the network provider and software packages to order from the applications provider. The SP would be responsible for provisioning its custom OSS/BSS systems and application services and provide the management. The customer would pay for the devices and software licenses upfront and either pay the SP per connection or by bandwidth usage. The device and software vendors would require a maintenance fee, which the SP would pass on to the customer. This is now an obsolete business model.

Present M2M/IoT Business Models

In the new M2M/IoT ecosystem SPs’ role and business models have changed. According to Network specialists, the device vendor gets around 20 percent; the network provider gets 15 percent and the application provider gets 65 percent. The new enhanced M2M devices have advanced processors that make them more intelligent, aware and thus more valuable. Because of enhanced hardware and firmware these devices can be embedded with antennas that can speak directly to the internet via 3/4G cellular or via WiFi routers. In most cases the radio access portion of the network domain has not been upgraded (2G or 3G wireless) so the expense is less. SPs use OSS/BSS platform partners because the OSS/BSS layer must be enhanced to accommodate the intelligent access devices. Application layer services are leveraged between application platform providers’ partnerships. These providers employ their own device, storage, cloud suppliers and application designers. To compete SPs have to engage in various business arrangements and complex strategic alliances with equity interests and exclusivity clauses. The negative effect is revenue fragmentation; however, providers can charge the customer more and thus raise the overall average revenue per unit. In this fragmented and crowded environment, how can the SPs continue to earn their full value?

Service Provider-Centric Use Cases

To earn their full value in the M2M/IoT ecosystem, SPs have to select their verticals and use cases very carefully. What are the characteristics of a monetizable use case for SPs? Service providers must adopt use cases that require a highly managed infrastructure and within these verticals should be mission critical and/or life dependent as well as wireless connectivity. These use cases will warrant more liability and require more regulatory demands but will enhance the importance of the SP’s network. The SP will maintain the value in the IoT ecosystem and customers will pay premium for the enhanced quality service. The following are examples of service provider-centric vertical use cases:

• Healthcare: Remote heart/lung/brain monitoring for patients in transit; remote surgical services (monitoring/surveillance)
• Transportation: Fleet/Asset tracking services where environmental controls for cargo/livestock need monitoring; telemetry (driverless vehicles); highly critical vehicle diagnostic monitoring and proactive resolution services
• Manufacturing: Airborne robotic devices; off-shore mobile device control and monitoring services
• Utilities: SCADA monitoring and proactive purification services for gas, water, soil, etc.
• Government: Surveillance of mission-critical items; disaster recovery bots
• Telecommunications: Banking processes and monitoring in remote areas

Dennis Ward

dward@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch