Nortel Networks Leading Charge to Establish Broadband Delivery Standards

Nortel Networks, Inc. and 32
other Internet industry leaders and content providers this week joined
forces 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, will serve as interim chairman of
the group until the BCDF’s inaugural meeting in May.

Alles, BCDF president pro temps, said Nortel initiated the creation
of the group in recognition 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 applications service revenues and Internet advertising
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 to maximize the return on
their access to the broad

band infrastructure.

According to the group, today’s Internet infrastructure architecture is
optimized for dial-up access, but 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.