SAN JOSE, Calif. - December 3, 1997 - Cisco Systems, Inc. announced today that Internet service providers worldwide are using new Cisco IOS Software capabilities to offer premium services and increase network efficiency.
Innovative Internet service providers worldwide including @HOME, Bell Canada, Global One, Hong Kong Telecom, MCI, Pacific Internet, Telefonica and UUNET - UK are working closely with Cisco to specify, test and deploy services that use Internet quality of service (QoS) capabilities to better meet customers needs and increase revenue opportunities.
"Cisco's Internet QoS capabilities enhance our network design and remove key obstacles to widespread deployment of profitable, media-rich content services," said Milo Medin, vice president of @Home Networks. "This capability allows us, the service provider, to determine how our network assets are used and allocated instead of the customer's traffic flows interacting without control, which typifies today's Internet. Cisco's Internet QoS combined with our end-to-end service architecture, allows us to deliver unique services not found anywhere else in the Internet."
"Internet QoS provides a key component of our IP services strategy," said Don Listwin, senior vice president of the Service Provider Line of Business at Cisco Systems, Inc. "This strategy will enable service providers to rapidly define and deploy profitable new services through a highly flexible, policy-based services platform, allowing their customers to prioritize traffic based on business needs. The strategy encompasses best of breed hardware and Cisco IOS software products, industry leading service creation and management capabilities, and comprehensive consulting support."
Premium and Sub-Rate Services Enabled
The new Cisco IOS software capabilities include committed access rate (CAR) and border gateway protocol (BGP) policy propagation. These new capabilities which run on Cisco 7200 and Cisco 7500 series routers and scale up to OC3/STM-1 rates, enable premium dedicated access. Thus, service providers can offer both standard and premium access where premium customers receive increased throughput, reduced delay and less packet loss during network congestion.
Service providers can also offer IP sub-rate services at lower price points for customers who currently require only a portion of the bandwidth available. Internet QoS uses CAR to classify and rate limit customer traffic and manage excess traffic according to the network policy. As the customer's needs change, the service provider can raise IP sub-rates to meet increased traffic demands without physically rearranging the network. BGP policy propagation is used to generate classification policies throughout a network via routing updates leading to more efficient provisioning and network operations. Together, these capabilities enable ISPs to manage customer bandwidth based on the business needs and policies of the customer.
"Companies are demanding a standard of service from the Internet that they've come to expect from traditional private data networks," said Stephen Von Rump, MCI's vice president of Enterprise Marketing. "Through our close work with Cisco and continued network enhancements for class of service offerings, MCI is setting the pace to provide the next wave of business-grade Internet services to our customers."
"Global One has worked closely with Cisco to define and test the Internet QoS functionality," said Scott Wainner, manager of Internetwork engineering at Global One. "In particular, the BGP policy propagation feature was developed as a direct result of Global One's requirements and input. The unique Cisco feature provides Global One with the ability to differentiate selected customers' traffic in both directions on our 'Global IP' network. Global One looks forward to working closely with Cisco to develop and deploy Internet QoS technology and services that bring important added value to our customers."
"We are leveraging the features of Cisco's Internet QoS software to bring innovative IP virtual private line and bandwidth management services to both our ISP and business customers," said William Wong, manager of Internet provisioning at Hong Kong Telecom. "By combining rate limiting, weighted fair queuing, BGP policy propagation, and NetFlow capabilities we are able to rapidly construct and differentially price new services which best meet our customers' needs, as well as maximize network capacity utilization."
Technical note to editors:
Other key revenue producing services based on Internet QoS capabilities include exchange point bandwidth control, premium Web hosting services and business and consumer multimedia applications support. Exchange point traffic control allows service providers to measure and control downstream traffic injected into the network and take into account negotiated traffic exchange agreements. Service providers are also using Internet QoS to provide differentiated Web hosting services such as access bandwidth management and premium delivery service. These services increase value to the customer and add incremental revenues for the service provider.
Several service providers also offer comprehensive, international, IP bandwidth management services to both corporate and downstream ISP customers. This service enables end-to-end, bi-directional, guaranteed bandwidth allocations, access to Web content in the United States and service level agreements that limit packet loss and delay. ISPs also gain maximum utilization of expensive international bandwidth by combining services on shared transport facilities.
Cisco IOS software has additional capabilities that now enable Internet QoS for large scale, high-speed, IP networks in environments like the Internet. Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) provides class and flow-based flexible bandwidth allocation and delay bounds across an IP network, while Weighted Random Early Detection (WRED) provides policy-based congestion avoidance techniques to give preferential treatment to premium class traffic. NetFlow provides granular Layer 3 measurements to support flexible billing, network planning and monitoring. Another Cisco IOS capability, Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF), enables fully distributed cacheless routing to maximize performance and functionality in large, complex networks with dynamic traffic patterns. These capabilities now run at OC-3 rates on the Versatile Interface Processor 2-50 (VIP2-50) with services enabled.
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) is theworldwide leader in networking for the Internet. athttp://www.cisco.com.
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