ICT research chief in the office of the group CTO, John Wittgreffe, outlined a five-stage development process for the carrier’s IP VPN offering, three of which are already completed.
First was the implementation of our MPLS network, then came the addition of software from Compuware for diagnosis and OpNet for prediction and modelling, he said. Earlier this year we announced managed real-time optimization with technology from Ipanema, and that leaves to more stages to come.
The first of these, which is already in prototype, will involve what Wittgreffe called rapid-to-real-time provisioning of bandwidth. He said this is already on consumer broadband services from BT, and will make its way into managed IP VPN in the form of QoS on demand. He cited examples such as certain corporate sites getting additional bandwidth for a couple days in a month, or at certain times of the day.
The service will be rolled out initially in the UK, where BT has its own infrastructure, then go international, where it will have to negotiate with last-mile providers from its MPLS PoPs to enable such flexibility in bandwidth allocation.
He said the final stage will be the tie-in with IT virtualization. This is the ability for BT, as the WAN provider, to integrate with the UC-style virtualized infrastructures that its corporate customers are implementing in their data centers. For instance, we should be able to spill over to additional data centers, Wittgreffe said, adding that again, this capability is already in the prototype phase.
