KEY POINTS:
There's nothing too exciting about the metallic box stylings of the Juniper Networks E320 Broadband Services Router.
Unimpressive it may be, but it, and devices like it, are part of an encouraging multi-million investment currently being made by various internet service providers.
This collective investment should go some way to improving the New Zealand internet experience, including offering a solution to one common grizzle: the low monthly data caps that prevent widespread uptake of services - such as on-demand video - that chew through a lot of bandwidth.
The E320 has a list price of about $150,000 and TelstraClear recently bought two, along with some associated high-tech "controller" gear to help boost its network capacity.
Ian Quinn, lead systems engineer with equipment supplier Juniper, says sales of this type of kit have been good.
"From the end of last year through the first half of this year there has certainly been a lot of investment by service providers.
"Some of that's been brought on by increased competition in the broadband space as well as changes such as unbundling."
New Zealand appears to be mirroring an international trend towards investment in this type of equipment. IT research firm Ovum says global sales of switching and routing equipment totalled US$3.4 billion ($4.85 billion) in the first quarter of this year, up 23 per cent on the same period last year. This is good news for the bottom lines of companies like Juniper and its competitors, including Cisco.
In our market, the opening up of Telecom's exchanges to competitors means Telecom Wholesale, Vodafone, TelstraClear and Orcon are now slugging it out to offer enhanced services over their own equipment and networks, while other ISPs are looking at other points of differentiation to attract customer interest. One of the tricks the E320 helps ISPs perform is "policy management" across their subscriber base: enabling more sophisticated provisioning of the specific types of services customers can sign up for.
An example is the ability to recognise and account for differences between local and international data customers download. One reason ISPs have such restrictive caps on the amount of data customers can access in a month is that we tend to pull down a lot of it from overseas. And given our geographic positioning in a remote, isolated section of the globe, getting data down here is expensive. But it doesn't make sense that content sourced from Europe or the US should cost the same as bits and bytes streamed from across town.
Providing cheaper tariffs for local traffic should mean services such as online video rental services where downloading the movie, rather than traipsing down to the video store, should finally become feasible. At present most users shun that type of service because a single movie download is likely to blow their entire month's data allowance.
TelstraClear's Australian parent Telstra has a list of sites linked to its "unmetered" service which customers can access without eating into their data caps. No doubt we'll soon see marketing based on this type of multi-tariff data access from local ISPs.
