By Susan J. Campbell
Consumers subscribing to residential services want multimedia delivery. While this is great news for network operators seeking to turn such services into incremental revenue opportunities, doing this successfully requires more than just lowering cost. This process also requires a High Leverage Network (HLN) architecture to extract the necessary value from the network, while also enhancing the user experience.
A recent Alcatel-Lucent white paper, Residential Service Delivery in a High Leverage Network: IP Transformation for Profitable Growth, highlights the reality that the consumer market is showing an expanding universe of blended multimedia applications, multi-screen services, devices and content that easily revolve around the Internet. The downside is shrinking profit margins as incremental revenues cannot keep pace with the increasing delivery cost of high bandwidth multimedia traffic. Service providers must identify a different way to drive profitable growth.
As the demand for multimedia residential services, next generation residential services and multi-screen services continues to grow, service providers need to figure out the best way to capitalize on these opportunities to drive growth. One proven opportunity lies in the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network. The architecture in the High Leverage Network is applied to enable the service provider to extract more value from the network and to enhance the overall user experience, while also enjoying sustainable revenue growth.
With the growth of multimedia residential services, network providers are serving as the carriage for Internet-based content and applications. And, while the network provides the vehicle, the main concern over the provider’s involvement has been related to net neutrality. In a sense, the service provider has the ability to hinder this traffic instead of add value to it or enable it for all consumers. Service providers are playing an integral role in securing the sustainable growth of the Internet and subsequent applications, content and devices. With the advent of Web 2.0, however, these networks must adapt to new requirements.
There are essentially five key transformations that must take place to drive network provider infrastructure. First is the convergence taking place within the home to create the connected home. End users will have access to multiple devices that all connect in a digital home network to share content seamlessly. Second, convergence must take place at the IP edge, driven by the need to support a unified multiservice, multi-device experience within the connected home.
Content enablement is easily the third element as consumers must be able to exchange content efficiently with producers. This method demands on-net content caching and delivery. Fourth, a host of network-based applications require more than just best-effort delivery and instead demands application enablement. Finally, IPv4 exhaust is imminent and the network must transform to IPv6.
All of these key elements are possible through the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network. When this infrastructure is leveraged as the primary backbone, the service provider can meet the oncoming challenges and turn them into profit opportunities.
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