Debut for first Exemplar project

THE FIRST project to use the Government’s Exemplar network as a test bed will be showcased next week at TM Forum’s Management World 2011, a global communications conference being held in Dublin for the first time.

Called Dynamic Desktop, the project was developed by Irish companies Intune Networks, Openet and Amartus and shows how their respective technologies can give network operators on-demand access to additional bandwidth.

“The service we’re demonstrating here allows a customer to request an on-demand improvement in bandwidth quality,” said John Dunne, co-founder and chief technology officer of Intune Networks. “This has never been done before in any network in the world and is the first demonstration of it.”

The goal is to create “liquid bandwidth”, which will allow operators charge customers based on the bandwidth they use, thus generating more revenue for operators from networks and adding flexibility to network connections.

Mr Dunne said liquid bandwidth would be attractive to companies that need constant, quality network connections.

To provide the bandwidth flexibility, Dynamic Desktop uses Intune’s optical packet switch and transport technology; Openet’s policy charging and control software; and Amartus’s service commander. BT is also supporting the project and all four companies involved are developing commercially their respective aspects of it, said Mr Dunne.

Openet CEO Niall Norton said the role of its software is to direct Intune’s physical network to allocate bandwidth to different places at different times.

“At a very high level, our software acts to instruct the Intune hardware to dynamically allocate bandwidth depending on the services of the subscriber,” he said.

He added that the Exemplar network proved a perfect test bed and is potentially a great asset for the country. “We work with 95 different operators across the world and the Exemplar network, for us, is as real-life as it gets . . . It’s a big, data-grade network and provides a very good analogy to any real operator,” he said.

The network was launched by the last Government as a means by which companies could deploy and test projects in a fibre-optic network. By the end of 2010, €15 million had been committed to the network by the State and future phases will see it grow nationally from a Dublin base.