NBN/NGN should support collaborative services concepts
In relation to the design and architecture of NBNs and NGNs a key issue is that the network needs to be designed in such a way as to be capable of delivering the services envisaged by the government – in particular, e-health, tele-education, smart grids, etc.
These services need to be made available for delivery to the end-user at a consistent level of quality-of-service (QoS), independently of commercial telecoms or broadband service providers where necessary. We have seen that this is technically possible via technologies such as IP tunnelling; however a key question will be who is to pay for the activation of such services. An NBN/NGN needs to be able to deliver them at a high level of QoS, as healthcare, smart grids and most commercial cloud-computing services will require privacy protection, reliability and security to an extremely significant degree.
The question therefore is whether this needs to be taken into account when designing a basic Layer 2 Ethernet network. Or can it be left to those who will finally provide these services? In exploring this it will be necessary to consider the cost to both the providers and the end-users.
For instance, the healthcare sector is comprised of many providers and they all relate to each other in one way or another, and therefore need to be able to interact with each other in a reliable environment.
Such a network is also known as a Collaborative Services Network (CSN) – rather than having healthcare data and services stored in some kind of gigantic data centre each provider would maintain its own services and the providers would be able to collaborate with each other through a relationship network.
National healthcare and standards organisations in some countries are already talking about this kind of network. Currently the healthcare services are using many different proprietary networks and services and this is already creating a major headache for the practitioners.
An NBN/NGN now offers the unique opportunity to transform that into one standardised format. Obviously it will take many years for all those systems to be aligned but we now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to at least consider it.
For this to happen it will be essential for governments to take the leadership role, as none of individual sub-sectors within healthcare have the power to instigate this. Once an overall network design has been established, each sub-sector can organise its own participation within that collaborative network, as it will be a distributed model and therefore can be organised according to a modular process.
It is also critical that Departments of Healthcare make their requirements known to those designing the NBN/NGN so that a proper discussion can take place to map out a plan for the future. It would be disastrous if the design of this infrastructure were to be established only to find out, a few years later (once the healthcare problems have escalated to such crisis levels as to demand action) that the NBN/NGN can’t facilitate or provide a national QoS healthcare network.
We have used healthcare to highlight these relationship networks, but it should be noted that they will also be needed in other industry sectors.
Paul Budde
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