BellSouth Chief Architect Hank Kafka walked into the lion’s den Tuesday night, attempting in a rapid-fire half-hour technology presentation to convince a skeptical VON crowd that burgeoning video traffic will swamp current IP network capacity and require regulatory freedom for carriers to offer tiered services.

Kafka was treated politely by an audience which spent much of its day hearing war cries against the incumbent carriers, both cable and telco, in the name of network neutrality and common carrier rules. There were no signs of conversion, however.

Filling in for BellSouth CTO Bill Smith, who cancelled his appearance for personal reasons, Kafka outlined the need for what he called an Application Services Infrastructure, which would knit together the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) infrastructure being developed for wireline/wireless voice and the Web Service Delivery platform being developed on the data services side by companies such as Microsoft and BEA. He said the discussions of the ASI concept have been going on for three to four yeas and that other service providers are also discussing it, though much work remains.

Individually, IMS and Web SDP provide the framework for standardized, reusable network components to be used in multiple ways, including by third-party applications, to offer new services, Kafka said.

The ASI “will knit together IMS and Web SDP to support a range of applications, and integrate the two of them to do more, so we will have a full set of services that tied together the mobile device, right through to your TV set,” he said.

ASI requires “the middle of the middleware” which BellSouth is working on with other service providers and technology vendors, Kafka said.

“There are some functions IMS does well and some that Web services does well,” he said. “The challenge is to map out which ones from which needs to be put together” in creating a single, IP network service with a single log-on/sign-in for customers.

“The challenge is to get the software in place and get capabilities sets for federation and trust that will let third parties work across the networks in delivering services, and that is a major software challenge,” Kafka said.

There is also what he termed “the challenge of Quantity” driven by the proliferation of devices such as Smart TVs, high-definition camcorders, and gaming systems like the Xbox 360 that feature high-definition modem extenders. Increasingly, consumers become content creators and the explosion of IPTV content drives up network volumes. Already today, there are video bloggers, such as the Pulver.com VON blog, which drive up metro area network traffic, he said.

While IPTV is initially a multicast phenomenon, basically following the cable broadcast model, Kafka said, “it migrates to a unicast model as more content is delivered in demand, and each stream gets sent separately.”

“Video over the Internet is also a point-to-point, not multicast, service, with various business models – pay-per-view, ad-supported – and the potential for huge increases in Internet traffic,” he said.

In an rapid fire finish, Kafka produced a chart which measured IP network traffic based on access speeds, quantity of content delivered, the busyload average traffic and the cost of delivery. Today’s Internet delivers access services at between 1.5 Megabits per second and 6 Mb/s but individual users consume less than 50 kilobits per second in average busy hour usage or about two gigabytes per month at a cost of $1, he said.

Video streaming of five movies a month to that some population, in standard definition, drives up average usage to 190 kb/s or 9 Gb per month at a cost of $4.50. If all TV viewing moves to an IP network, at standard definition, the average access speed is bumped up to 12 mb/s, average busy hour usage is 1.3 Mb/s, quantity consumed is 22 Gb a month and the cost is $112, according to Kafka.

By the time those video streams are high definition, the numbers are staggering – the users need 24 Mb/s service, which can be delivered over today’s copper networks, Kafka said, but busy hour usage is 6.7 Mb/s, quantity consumer is 1120 Gb and the cost is $560 a month.

“That is out of the range of reasonability,” he said. “If we have to deliver that rw access speed, we can’t build that at prices that make no sense at all. What we can do is move to a new content distribution model, using network management tools for traffic control and quality of service that can handle the massive amounts of new bandwidth.”

There are a variety of new optical technologies, including optical switching and ROADMs, which can also be deployed to increase network capacity, but “that won’t happen overnight,” Kafka warned.

The key thing to realize, he said, is that access does not equal traffic capacity – there is much more involved in delivering high-speed access services than merely putting fat pipes into the access network.

That is why, Kafka concluded, companies like BellSouth need “the regulatory freedom to pursue new business models.”