Caspian Network today announced new software for provisioning premium Internet services that delivers guaranteed service quality from a media controller for 10 Gigabit per second Ethernet networks, enabling the introduction of tiered services for both consumers and content providers. The company also said that SK Telecom of South Korea is using the Caspian Media Controllers, with the new FlowState QoS software, to operate its eGovernment network over a 10 Gigabit per second MPLS backbone.

“In these large networks, the emphasis is moving very quickly away from basic routing or basic connectivity,” said Jeff Behar, director of marketing at Caspian. “For years, traffic management was a component of a switch or router. But the Quality of Service that is native to switches or routers isn’t optimized for the type of traffic patterns the Internet has. Each of those different types need to be identified an isolated. That’s a degree of granularity you don’t get with switch or router platforms.”

Caspian has designed its Media Controllers to be optimized just for traffic management, Behar said, using its FlowState QoS technology, to be a highly scalable means of creating services, prioritizing traffic through the network based on service type and controlling access based on customer profile.

“Flow-state QoS at 10 Gig is new in the industry and new for us,” Behar said. “It’s really a complementary set of technologies. It’s not meant to replace MPLS or IP – in fact, it can augment an existing network or built in from the ground up, make one entirely better.”

As more bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications including voice and video come onto the Internet, service providers can no longer cope by overbuilding their networks, he said. Instead they want to “realize greater efficiency out of any increment of bandwidth added to the network,” Behar said.

The SK Telecom network is optimized for high-quality multimedia services, he said, in a way that goes beyond what MPLS can do.

“South Korea already has broadband converged networks which touch almost any part of their society – consumers, businesses, health, government, education,” Behar said. “This is an ecosystem initiative which is a network of networks providing public and private sector access into government resources, and also being used for internal government operations. They are using 10Gig, with MPLS to separate out types of traffic but they needed to go a step further.”

South Korea was already running its network at high-usage levels because so many consumers have connections up to 100 Megabits per second and because of the proliferation of multimedia applications in Asia, including a wide range of gaming and interactive video services. Traffic management became an important part of making the most of the eGovernment network, Behar said.

The new QoS FlowState functionality is available as a 10 gigabit Ethernet port or 10 x 1 Gigabit Ethernet ports.