A Vancouver-based telecom solutions supplier today unveiled a new broadband edge aggregation device that company officials and industry experts say could change the way broadband providers make money.

 

Zeugma Systems’ so-called “Zeugma Services Node,” or ZSN, is expected to change the way networks operate by tightly melding service delivery applications with a high-performance traffic management and forwarding system, company officials say.

 

In particular, the ZSN allows providers to monetize Internet traffic, Kevin Walsh, the company’s vice president of marketing, told TMCnet in an interview. Traditionally, providers only make money from subscribers, Walsh said. With the ZSN, they can also profit from advertisers and content delivery networks, he said.

 

“The ZSN is a service delivery router combining massive compute resources with next-generation capacity, service awareness, and subscriber awareness in a carrier-grade system,” company officials say.

 

What results is a new class of equipment, Zeugma officials say, that lets service providers: rapidly prototype and launch revenue-generating services; identify and monitor session flows on a highly granular per-subscriber, per-service basis; manage session flows to enforce policy-based quality of service and capacity; develop applications that add value to individual session flows; and reduce the number of devices required for broadband aggregation and subscriber management.

 

The technology is being hailed by international Tier-1 service providers that Zeugma already has worked with.

 

Kevin Woollard, a technical strategist at London-based BT (News - Alert) Group’s office of the chief technical officer, said his company requires highly scalable solutions in order to deliver applications and services in the future.

 

“As an operator we need highly scalable, high performance solutions that allow BT to deliver applications and services in the future that we haven’t even thought of yet,” Woollard said. “We are currently investigating the Zeugma Services Node’s capabilities, and are excited by the potential of the technology. Whether BT, Zeugma, system integrators, or third-party developers write the applications, the ZSN appears to offer the embedded compute resources able to support them.”

 

According to Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst with industry research firm Infonetics Research (News - Alert), broadband providers must quickly develop and deploy new services in order to remain relevant and competitive.

 

“Today’s value creation and value add is largely in services, and not in the capacity and pipes to deliver such services,” Howard said. “The ZSN is the first of a new breed of service delivery routers and could be a game changer.”

 

Zeugma officials say the ZSN provides a new level of intelligence, extensibility, and flexibility to broadband service providers through a unique platform architecture.

 

That architecture is composed of four main elements. First, for open applications support, the ZSN scales up to 520,000 DMIPS using embedded Compute Blades. Second, for high-speed broadband aggregation, traffic forwarding, and deep packet inspection (DPI), traffic blades (TBs) provide up to 720 Gbps of capacity. Third, the ZSN includes a native application execution environment, the Zeugma OAS, that provides APIs for system control functions and a secure run-time environment.  Finally, Zeugma provides a number of applications that can be run within the Zeugma OAS.

 

Zeugma’s chief executive officer, Andrew Harries, said most network operators want a fast turn-up of new services on a per subscriber basis.

 

“The best way to achieve that is to meld service delivery applications with a high-performance traffic management and forwarding system,” Harries said.