Nortel's Broadband Gang

Who will set the standards for broadband?

by Patricia Fusco
of internetnews.com

Nortel Networks, Inc. and 32 other Internet industry leaders and content providers this week joined together to establish the Broadband Content Delivery Forum (BCDF).

The BCDF was formed to focus on building open architectures to enhanced multimedia content over emerging broadband networks and improve end user experience through improved performance.

The goal of the group is to improve the online community's broadband experience while opening up new opportunities for service and content providers.

Anthony Alles, Nortel Networks (NT) IP services president and general manager, is to serve as interim chairman of the group until the BCDF's inagraul meeting in May.

Alles, BCDF president pro temps, said Nortel initiated the creation of the group because it recognized that the evolving broadband Internet would be fundamentally different from the Internet of today.

"The Internet has historically been about ubiquitous connectivity, but tomorrow's high-performance Internet will be different," Alles said. "Industry leaders must come together to build tools and technologies, much as yesterday's leaders came together years ago, in bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to build the technologies of today's Internet. BCDF brings together fresh thinking and new perspectives to the mission of building the broadband business case."

Tim Johnson, Ovum senior research analyst, said the BCDF is a key step toward breaking open the high-bandwidth services market.

"Ovum estimates that Internet advertising and applications service revenues alone will be worth over US$20 billion worldwide in 2001," Johnson said. "But the full development of content service revenues will depend on streamlining access and communications for the subscriber. If the BCDF helps to do that, it will deliver significant benefits for everybody involved with content services."

The BCDF is currently soliciting membership from the entire broadband business segment. In addition to Nortel, BCDF members include industry leaders Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM) , Alta Vista Co., AT&T Corp. (T), Bertelsmann AG, British Telecom (BT), CMGI, Inc. (CMGI) , Enron Corp (ENE), Qwest Communications International Inc., (Q), Sun Microsystems, Inc. (SUNW) , and Telstra Corp. (TLS).

One of the proposals scheduled for review by the BCDF in May is Nortel's personal content tunnel (PCT) technology that allows multiple subscribers to connect simultaneously across a single broadband access line to multiple service and content providers.

Nortel contends that it's important for wholesale access providers who offer subscribers a choice of service providers maximize the return on their access to the broadband infrastructure.

According to the group, today's Internet infrastructure architecture is optimized for dial-up access. The design is not conducive to transporting broadband content. The BCDF plans to focus on developing open architectures for improving the performance of broadband content delivery by bypassing sluggish dial-up bottlenecks and aggregating high-speed networks.

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