Nortel Leads New Industry Group for Broadband Content

Nortel
Networks Tuesday joined other Internet infrastructure, content,
and service providers to establish the Broadband Content Delivery Forum (BCDF).

The group will focus on recommending open architectures to deliver rich multimedia
content over the emerging broadband networks and improve end user experience
through improved performance and personalization.

Charter members include AltaVista, AT&T (ATT), Bertelsmann, British
Telecom, Hewlett Packard (HP), Inktomi (INKT), NBCi (NBCI), Qwest (Q), Sun Microsystems (SUNW),
Telocity, and Telstra — more than 30 companies in all.

Anthony Alles, Nortel Networks’ (NT) president and general manager for IP
Services, will serve as interim chairman of the group until the BCDF’s
initial meeting next month.

Alles said that the company “initiated the creation of BCDF because we
recognized that the evolving broadband Internet will be fundamentally
different from the Internet as we know it today.”

As one of the proposals for review by the BCDF, Nortel will recommend its
personal portal technology for Web-based services advertisements and its
personal content tunnel (PCT) technology.

With these technologies, according to Nortel, service providers can enable network logins and
advertise personalized content and applications services. Hyperlinks from
these advertisements trigger PCTs, which let subscribers connect directly
from their desktops to local broadband content servers over broadband
connections — without using the narrowband Internet.

Both personal portals and PCTs rely upon the presence in the network of new
broadband devices such as Nortels Shasta 5000 Broadband Service Node.

Nortel will present a proposal for an architectural framework and technical
details for these technologies at the BCDF’s first meeting.

“The BCDF is a key step toward breaking open the high-bandwidth services
market,” said Tim Johnson, senior analyst with Ovum, a research and
consulting company.

“We estimate that Internet advertising and applications service revenues
alone will be worth over US$20 billion worldwide in 2001. But the full
development of content service revenues will depend on streamlining access
and communications for the subscriber.”