The current economic climate has had a chilling effect on NGN rollout plans for many carriers. In the past, carriers built and developed as much as they could themselves, from a network and software perspective. Now they’re looking for more options like outsourcing or leasing, which allow them to defer significant CAPEX investment while maintaining control.

We at Tata Communications are working to support our carrier partners through some innovative architectures enabled by our NGN investment. The equipment and design we’re using in our NGN allows us to partition and create an infrastructure-sharing model that allows customers to manage and create a virtual network within our global backbone. The virtual networks are segregated and separate from ours but allow customers to tap into our network infrastructure and facilities worldwide.

Virtual networks are just one example of new features we can provide through NGN. In the future, NGN will allow us to support voice applications among end customers like mobile operators or broadband providers that follow more of a peering model rather than a call termination model. There are also new services on our enterprise side such as Voice VPN that we are looking to offer because of NGN capabilities.

As the economy continues to falter, operators will look for more and more ways to reduce costs, improve productivity, and decrease the time-to-market for new services. Tata Communications is dedicated to maximize the business impact of our NGN investment to help our customers achieve their objectives.

Over the last five years, many industry players have announced their intention to transition to a Next Generation Network (NGN). Carriers who provide international data and IP services as well as voice termination are particularly interested because of the synergies afforded when running multiple applications over one network. It’s interesting to look at the different philosophies at play in the varying ways carriers have made their plans.

When we were looking at our NGN rollout, we knew we wanted to have centralized business intelligence engines to manage our voice services and then use that information to push out instructions to our various end-points. We worked closely with our NGN equipment vendor to ensure that our routing technology could integrate with the soft switches to maintain this centralization, as well as focus on different features we think will be important down the road as we roll out new products that leverage our IP backbone.

Other carriers don’t seem to have this type of centralization focus today. They might have multiple switching facilities around the world but they effectively operate as stand-alone companies, with their own routing logic to terminate calls.

We prioritized a unified voice routing architecture because it reduces our overall operating costs as well as the expense and time-to-market associated with launching new services. With a distributed routing architecture, some services may only be available in some regions, or it may be slower and more expensive to roll out services to all regions.

Certainly there are risks and challenges associated with centralized routing management, especially during the transition phase from legacy networks to NGN. These include execution or failure risks that could impact global rather than regional performance as well as increased intra-company facilities as traffic transits from legacy to NGN end-points. However, with sufficient network design that includes redundancy and diversity, execution risk can be mitigated; and, the long-term benefits of NGN far outweigh the short-term costs of managing a hybrid network of legacy and NGN facilities.

In the end, our operator customers are the beneficiaries of our choice in network evolution, and it is instructive to see the impact that the service options presented over our NGN architecture will have.

At the recent ISOC Asia conference in Kuala Lumpur a rather innocuous coffee break question was raised: could any one around the table name some of the major TLD’s still delinquent in their IPv6 support? Nobody could answer on the spot but the question intrigued me.

A logical place to start looking for an answer was ICANN. Their Kim Davies provided a rather revealing perspective in a presentation at ICANN 34 in april. 41% of the 280 existing TLD’s did not provide any IPv6 connectivity and more than 68% did without any diversity. Even for IPv4 it was surprising to see that 7.2% of TLD’s do not provide diversity, contrary to IANA rules. Two name servers separated by geography and topology are required and the same applies for IPv6 (gTLD applicant guidebook).

IANA provides a list of all legitimate TLD’s, including the recent fancy additions like museum and the like. Hurricane’s Mike Leber’s IPv6 deployment progress report, which is updated daily, provided another piece of the puzzle. When correlated to the IANA list, bingo, the culprits became visible, many obscure but a number of them rather out of place in this set. To refine the model, the title of Top Level Delinquent could be bestowed on the TLD with the largest number of domain names allocated under its ‘top’.

As ICANN and IANA can only do so much to enforce rules and regulations, an independent, up to date shame list, pillory of the cyber age, might help delinquents recognize themselves and also expose potential weak points in the internet. To give recognition to top performers on the other hand, why not create a TTLD honour roll for TLD’s who have 3 or more IPv6 authorities?

Oh yes, 9.6% of TLD’s still had open recursive name servers. Safe bet that some failed the grade in both the IPv6 and open recursivity categories oblivious of another Kaminsky type attack.

Progress is being made but to accelerate on the road of IP convergence and instill more confidence in the ‘public internet’, some additional discipline in the Domain Name area, starting with the top and working its way down, would certainly not hurt.