The founder of futureLAB says that open source systems free businesses from support contracts and upgrade plans. With a copy of the code, ISPs can upgrade their systems how and when they wish.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [February 6, 2003]

Serving a minimum of 50,000 subscribers and starting at about $435,000, the Arteria ISP Platform is not for everyone. However, it is based on open source products (including a licensed RADIUS server for which the source code is provided to customers) and runs on off-the-shelf servers.

The product was developed by a technology group that calls itself futureLAB, based in Winterthur, Switzerland. The group built an ISP in 1995 (Internet Access AG), sold it in 1998 to a telco, diAx (diAx is now owned by Sunrise). The group found the telco environment stifling, and founded their own company in 2000.

That year was not the best to start a company, but a single massive customer win funded further development of the company's nascent open source telecommunications system.

Cablecom of Switzerland had a furious end of the millennium, participating in several mergers and acquisitions before being acquired by the international cable giant NTL. Cablecom is the largest of Switzerland's 450 local cable operators, and has made a significant investment in its ISP arm. The company claims 130,000 broadband customers across the nation of Switzerland.

Cablecom may be a mammoth in Switzerland, but 130,000 broadband customers is a mid-sized ISP in many other nations. The solution developed by futureLAB is therefore appropriate for many companies that compete with larger incumbents.

Matthias Aebi, futureLAB founder and CEO, said, "we were thrilled to win a competitive contract against offerings from companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Siemens."

The company won by offering a full set of features at a lower price. The Arteria ISP Platform provides about 20 services. Each service runs on a single virtual server which in turn consists of two or more real servers. The Cablecom deployment averaged seven servers per service.

futureLAB believes that true redundancy cannot exist in a single box, even though companies will try to sell appliances with "built-in redundancy". Instead, the Arteria solution uses servers that can be interchanged easily. If one server goes down, another can step in and carry the load.

Twenty services every ISP would like to provide
The services supported by the solution are detailed in this chart. The foundation of the solution, shown as "Basic Technologies," is comprised of three key items: load balancing from brand name providers, multiple layers of security, and network attached storage (the cablecom deployment used products from Network Appliance, with storage backed up by Network Appliance's "snap mirror" to additional file servers).

The second tier, "Basic Services," provides data for all ISP services. The compilation of statistics and the monitoring of performance are fundamental to any IP network. The logging of data in the syslog is also a fundamental service. Statistics can be viewed in a graphical display format.

Network Locking is an important extra task in any multiple server environment. Aebi notes, "we can have multiple sessions for a single user on multiple servers. It is vital that no one session override another session, and that all sessions close when a user logs off. It's very important, and in this environment, it's not very simple."

The Group Management server allows an ISP or its business customers to create groups of users and groups of groups of users. Aebi noted that an employee at a business customer might be part of a department group, a location group, and a group encapsulating every employee of that customer. Residential user groups can be based on pricing plans. This feature relies on accurate statistics and monitoring. Explains Aebi, "your engine needs to have data to build the pricing plans."

Aebi is proud of the LDAP server. He told us that futureLAB participates in the OpenLDAP project, and helped extend LDAP functionality so that the service can run on multiple servers (a feature called "Multi-Master LDAP").

Aebi said that no ISP will need a lesson on the importance or function of DNS.

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