What's new in networks? It's Infranet

Is there a need for a new network. Your first response may be a 'NO' but thinking again you may say a 'YES.' Internet has been around for quite a few years, where on one hand it has brought widespread connectivity at a low cost the baggage also brings performance issues and lack of security.

Need for a new type of public network that brings with it flexibility of Internet but delivers a much higher quality in terms of service and security is rapidly arising. Working in this direction networking vendors and service providers have joined hands to create a public IP infrastructure, called Infranet.

The consortium comprises of service providers such as AOL, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Level 3 Communications and Qwest; network gear vendors Ericsson, Juniper, Lucent and Polycom; and application and computing companies such as HP, IBM and Oracle.

Infranet is the brainchild of California based Juniper Networks and with it the company has outlined the promise of a new public network, which will enable organizations to exchange mission-critical business as well as personal information over a public network; get on-demand high-quality service; as well as access next-generation, multimedia communication services.

According to Juniper 'today's challenges cannot be solved by conventional private or public networking approaches. The solution is neither a public Internet nor a private infrastructure; it is the best of both.'

Infranet is defined as a public network different from conventional closed and proprietary networks that can be used to deliver request-based services and user experience. The application running at the user's system can dynamically request for a desired level of security, quality and bandwidth from the network. To cater to these specific user requests is a predictable network that promises 'assured delivery' enabling person-to-person communication and delivery of applications like video conferencing, on-demand video etc.

According to Juniper Networks Infranet will be built independently by each service provider and will be interconnected, emerging into a global meta-network similar to today's PSTN and Internet, but will deliver a completely different set of services in a more secure and reliable manner.

This form of secure and predictable public network can benefit enterprises and governments as they can look at Web-enabling their businesses thereby leveraging on their productivity. Infranet can give a major boost to content distribution as content providers can look at delivering a wide range of services that can be provided over it in a safer, more reliable manner and promise a high-quality user experience.

Service providers that found the Internet too limiting for providing premium business services to their customers can use Infranet to offer them. These services will be provided to users who have subscribed to them after proper identity as well as 'right to claim' services access, thus differentiating it from the conventional network that is merely a connection/transport resource. Multiple customers with same requirements can be assigned one partition instead of creating separate VPNs for each customer or service type.

The main advantage of content distribution over Infranet is that the user can choose the kind of service it wants. According to Juniper 'Infranet will unlock true person-to-person, next generation communication' by providing such request based services across the entire public network

Infranet sounds very interesting and useful. But what does the future hold? How soon will it get implemented? What are the hurdles? are some of the questions that need to be answered. In an article that featured in Juniper's internal newsletter, Pradeep Sindhu, vice chairman and chief technical officer of Juniper Networks has addressed some of these.

According to Sindhu, there has to be a focused approach by the industry to make Infranet a reality. He has stressed on the importance of a single open standard rather than multiple standards, which may 'dilute' the power of any-to-any network. 'Single set of open standards that are allowed to evolve are not perfect, but they offer us the best way to move to the goal of a single infrastructure for communications,' informed Sindhu.

Sindhu is very optimistic about the future of Infranet because of the kind of benefits it can deliver, the technical hurdles are also of a very 'solvable' nature and hence not a barrier. However, no set timeframe has been promised by Juniper because of the many players in the Infranet game.

According to Girdhar Java, country manager- India and SAARC, with Juniper, 'We are trying to move from an era of promises to an era of delivery to provide users an enriched service.' Till such time, let's wait and watch!