Carrier companies enter the ASP fray

NEW DELHI: Should a carrier company be allowed to become an ASP? That’s the $11 billion dollar question. However, a presentation made by Rathi Thanawala, Vice-President, Network Planning Solutions, Bell Labs, showed that participation of carriers can alleviate the problem of bandwidth. According to him, ASPs, which require very high bandwidth, invest more time and money in managing bandwidth, data centers, service integration, customer interface and administration than in providing the solution itself which is the core-competency. As a result, most ASPs lose focus and are yet to make money. If telcos like Lucent step into the ASP scene, the ASPs will not have to worry about things like bandwidth management and network management and such a model could result in a win-win situation for both.

Since the service requirements are high reliability, scalability, zero application latency and security, today’s networks require an infrastructure that allows convergence of voice, data, and multimedia of high quality. The need of the hour is for carriers to provide for technology that can support all these applications for which circuit switching will not be adequate and packet switching has to be adopted. Lucent itself is moving towards packet switching which has much more capacity and enables more efficient utilization of bandwidth.

With five million e-mail messages being sent every minute, 37 million people logging onto the net every day, 6,30,000 phone lines being installed every week, the Internet traffic is doubling every week, the load on bandwidth is only to be imagined.