NetEx says its HyperPipe bandwidth optimization software will increase data throughput over existing broadband networks by up to 10 times (10X) at only a fraction of the cost of upgrading entire networks.
If the 10X increase is proven in widespread deployments outside the lab, it means that instead of offering 5 Mbps to a subscriber, a service provider will be able to offer a 50 Mbps-like performance to the user. That’s definitely more than a Band-Aid for the Net’s infrastructure.
The telecommunications industry established during last week’s NXTcomm trade show that it recognizes that the flood of videos, streamed and downloaded, legal and illegal, professionally made and home made, will soon slow the Net’s pace to a dial-up crawl unless new technologies are developed and deployed.
Service providers, both telcos and cablecos, can deploy HyperPipe to deliver next-generation “wideband” services over existing broadband IP networks, NetEx says.
NetEx says HyperPipe gives service providers two main benefits:
It eliminates the need for multi-billion dollar infrastructure upgrades and offers new revenue opportunities from enhanced wideband services
HyperPipe, the company says, can be easily deployed at an ISP, telco or media company’s central office and on the customer’s cable box or PC, “delivering an instant massive speed improvement requiring no investment in upgrading the network.”
The company says HyperPipe has the potential to dramatically reshape the Internet access market by eliminating the billion-dollar expense and extended timelines that are typically required for companies to upgrade their networks in order to deploy wideband speeds and services.
Comcast and Verizon currently offer 50 Mbps broadband services. Verizon has said it will spend more than $23 billion over the next several years building its FIOS fiber-to-the-home optical network that offers the same 50 Mbps speed as Comcast. Other providers such as AT&T and Time Warner Cable are still offering the same broadband speeds they did a couple of years ago. The telcos in particular are looking to increase the speeds of their existing DSL copper wire networks to compete with the cablecos, at least until the telcos can run a fiber cable to every home.
With traditional technology, according to NetEx, “it would be a daunting task for any provider to catch up to those competitors, requiring an investment of tens of billions of dollars and take several years to deploy fiber.”
Whether there is cable, copper, fiber or WiMAX to the home, HyperPipe provides a game-changing solution, the company says. Deploying HyperPipe over their existing networks would enable any and all service providers to deliver video and data services at up to 100 Mbps.
Just as important as the cost savings, NetEx says, is the rapidity of deployment. That’s because HyperPipe simply requires the software to be installed at both ends of the network at the central office and in the broadband modem. HyperPipe can be pre-loaded in a broadband modem or automatically downloaded when the customer connects to the network.
The issue, according to NetEx’ VP of business development Robert MacIntyre, is not the size of the pipe; it’s the inefficiency of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that is used to transport data to and from the home. “It’s not the pipe,” he said, ‘s the TCP.” According to MacIntyre, TCP sucks up too much bandwidth, up to as much as 60% to 80%, leaving little room for data throughput. TCP, he said, was designed for local area networks (LANs) but is now being used over wide area networks (WANs). Retransmission and error recovery, he said, takes much of the available bandwidth.
HyperPipe Compatibility
Consumer Premises Equipment Networks
PC copper
Cable Modem coax
DSL Modem Wi-Fi
Fiber Modem WiMAX
Gateway fiber optic
Set-top box satellite
“Glass-to-the-house alone,” MacIntyre said, referring to costly fiber optic upgrades commonly regarded as the bedrock of the next-generation Internet, won’t solve the bandwidth challenge the telcos and cablecos are facing.
The better solution in terms of cost and time-to-market, NetEx says, is to optimize the existing network rather than upgrade existing ones.
“HyperPipe radically changes the dynamics of this market, giving providers the ability to deliver next-generation services without the cost and time delays of deploying next-generation networks,” said MacIntyre. “The time-to-market advantages of our HyperPipe software solution gives service providers the freedom to look at the market opportunities more strategically along with the ability to rapidly enter a wideband market selectively to give them the highest ROI.”
MacIntyre used Comcast and its 50 Mbps service to illustrate how HyperPipe can help. Comcast’s service runs at an advertised maximum speed of 50 Mbps over a 100 Mbps cable. However, that bandwidth is typically consumed with re-transmits and other communications noise that detract from the 50 Mbps end-to-end performance.
With the addition of HyperPipe software, MacIntyre said those communication ssues are mitigated and the data delivery is optimized to the point where a provider such as Comcast can deliver 50 Mbps of usable data throughput over a fraction of the bandwidth, leaving the majority of the bandwidth free to deliver additional services such as voice over IP (VoIP), video-on-demand, music-on-demand, live events, video streaming and other “X-on-demand” services.
HyperPipe was designed to accelerate traffic over an IP network, the company said. The algorithms within HyperPipe reportedly eliminate the problems that constrain the speed of typical IP networks by protecting data packets from variations in the quality of line conditions such as latency, jitter and bit errors that require packets to be re-sent. HyperPipe then compresses the data before sending it across the IP network.
The net result is up to a 10X speed boost for traffic over the existing network.
No company has yet ordered HyperPipe for deployment. NetEx says one major telco is field testing HyperPipe but would not say who it is or in what country.NetEx was formed in 1999 as a spin-off of Storage Technology (StorageTek) and is privately held.
The company’s DNA is developing software that optimizes the movement of large blocks of data for mission critical applications on a variety of computers and operating systems. Its expertise is in making more data move over a network more safely and quickly.
NetEx, and formerly StorageTek, says it has been selling products for more than 20 years to hundreds of the world’s largest organizations including, IBM, BP, Telstra (Australia’s incumbent telco), NTT (Japan’s incumbent telco), Verizon, BellSouth (since acquired by AT&T), Qwest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds bank, IRS, Kellogg and the airlines: American, Lufthansa, Northwest and United.
Its HyperIP software is used for backing up and replicating data between two devices. EMC, the storage giant, resells HyperIP.
Faultline opinion
There have been TCP/IP rivals before. TCP expects an acknowledgement message for each packet it sends and if it hasn’t received it after a certain amount of time it sends the information again at half the speed and so on. Systems like NetEx and like something called the Vega protocol that we came across before, play around with this equation. For instance the time allowed for the acknowledgement is longer, or the acknowledgement messages are grouped together and sent in one large bundle, or the degradation upon not receiving a return packet is to 90% not all the way down to 50%. Data can also be sent in larger blocks.
The drawback with them is that parts of the network will behave unpredictably and this is not thought of as a solution for an entire network, only for specific part of it. What is perhaps really required is autonomic reconfigurable protocol that looks at the data it is sending and optimizes itself for that type of data, and then puts itself back to TCP when it is done.