Markus Andreas Hofmann

A profitable multicast business model

One of the main impediments in wide scale deployment of multicast is lack of a good business model. Any technology needs a good business model to succeed. In this article we present a simple business model for multicast in the Internet that uses the inherent benefits of multicast to make it profitable to all the parties, including the multicast sender, multicast receivers and the network providers, that are involved. Our model is based on the following principle. Multicast receivers should not pay any additional fee for receiving multicast over unicast but might pay for the content, the sender pays for the bandwidth used in multicast to the Internet service provider(s) (ISP) and might charge the receivers for the content. We demonstrate that the use of our model proves profitable to the sender, receivers and the ISPs. We also discuss some deployment issues.

Opportunities for VoIP application integration services

Service providers and enterprises expect voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)to enable third-party application development, allowing them to mix-and-match best-of-breed applications from multiple vendors. By taking advantage of applicable techniques employed for Web-based services, service broker functionality deployed in the network will provide a framework for specifying VoIP application interaction rules. However, each unique VoIP deployment will require development of a complex, customized, domain-specific set of interaction rules for the service brokers. The complexity of VoIP application interaction rule development in a multi-vendor environment will provide Lucent with an opportunity to sell application integration services to enterprises and service providers.