OTT

Does Gmail outage open the door for Operations as a Service?

Google’s Gmail suffered yet another publicized outage, which is raising concerns not only about whether the Google system is really ready for serious use, but whether SaaS and cloud computing overall might be exposing enterprises to more risk than they bargained for.

Data on the paid version of the service isn’t available so we can’t be sure whether the paid traffic is doing better in terms of reliability, but certainly many users would try the free version first to decide whether to commit to a paid equivalent.

We believe Google is on the horns of a major dilemma, in that it needs to start creating a for-pay model in application, computing and even video streaming services, and to do that, it needs something more than best efforts. That not only means its own platforms have to be very reliable. It means its network connections need to be good, too.

This may be the issue that will spawn more constructive dialog with network operators on premium handling, but rumor says the last talks were stymied by the question of who supports the customer. Operators need to think about making their own operations/support process highly efficient so they can not only boost their own net profit but sell operations as a service too Google.

Service-layer evolution: Pushing for vendor support

ATIS, a body driven primarily by the service providers, has announced its own initiative for what it calls the Service Oriented Network or SON. While nobody is positioning this explicitly as a repudiation of either the vendor support for the service layer or standards progress in defining standards there, we’re hearing that it’s both.

Operators have been disenchanted with the response of vendors to their pressure to develop flexible solutions for hosted service features to let them compete better with OTT players. They’ve also been unhappy with the debate and dallying in the standards area. Now they are apparently launching a thinly veiled threat to drive the process themselves.

We’ve also heard that at least two and as many as four vendors will announce service-layer strategies/products this fall.

FCC could enter cable bandwidth management fray

Comcast has, as we had predicted, asserted to the FCC that its voice service is not carried over the Internet or Internet access infrastructure, and is therefore neither subject to their traffic management policies nor to the FCC’s four principles of net neutrality.

They’re right, of course. Cable, or PacketCable specifically, divides the data path, and broadband Internet and Comcast VoIP do not share capacity. The question now is whether the FCC will decide that it doesn’t matter whether the stuff is separate or not. We think such a decision would be the regulatory equivalent of junk science: It would imply that common carriage on any facility imposed the regulatory burdens of the most regulated service on all services.

These are not logical times, however, and regulations are never logical. The biggest risk here is that the FCC would do something that would overturn the original 2005 decision that broadband was not a “telecommunications service” and thus was not subject to unbundling provisions of the Telecom Act. That was a highly speculative ruling that stood largely because the RBOCs bought AT&T and MCI, who were bankrolling opposition.

Vuze, the online video company, has also asked the FCC to look into the Cox plan for bandwidth management. This shows that cable company needs to control bandwidth use, primarily uplink bandwidth for P2P, but also streaming bandwidth will be increasingly colliding with the over-the-top (OTT) players’ desires to pump content at no incremental cost. The shared-media nature of the cable plant is the industry’s biggest risk, as DOCSIS 3.0 is the biggest asset, and moving to DOCSIS 3.0 is useful only if content doesn’t just expand to fill the new pipe too.