nuMetra: Moving Beyond “Best-Effort” Delivery

Due to the current explosion in Internet bandwidth demand, the communications industry faces a logistical quagmire, similar to issues faced by highway planners seeking to better rush-hour traffic flows:

• Building new lanes is capital intensive, as is adding bandwidth capacity;
• Newly added lanes increases traffic jams due to increased lane changes just as adding bandwidth does not fix video buffering problems, and;
• A highway driver’s trip at 3 a.m. differs drastically at 5 p.m., similar to the quality of a broadband user’s experience during non-peak and peak Internet usage times.

After decades of study, U.S. interstate planners are rapidly converting regular “fast” lanes in high traffic, metropolitan areas to “fast-track” toll lanes, priced variably to congestion levels to provide motorists in a hurry with a new express choice and encourage travel during non-peak travel periods. This, unfortunately for bandwidth consumers, is where the comparison stops.

Challenges Facing “The Broadband Ecosystem”

Today’s “best-effort” Internet places a hard ceiling on the Quality of Service (QoS) of bandwidth, with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their respective customers and partners presented with a set of technical and economic challenges yet to be sufficiently addressed, including:

• The lack of an inter-network infrastructure that provides ISPs with the ability to manage bandwidth as per the specific needs of an application (effect on ISPs = shrinking gross margins; effect on media companies = premium quality content distribution over the global Internet not possible);
• The lack of an economic incentive for ISPs to build-out their networks to meet customer demands for higher-quality, bandwidth-intensive services such as streaming video (effect on both ISPs and media companies = unmet consumer expectation, decreased gross revenue potential);
• The lack of global cooperation amongst ISPs to manage bandwidth QoS between their respective networks (effect on ISPs and media companies = unmet consumer expectation, decrease in gross revenues);
• The lack of an enforceable, cost-efficient digital rights management (DRM) framework to protect media companies against the pirated distribution of their content (effect on ISPs and media companies = increase in “policing” costs & the “souring” of their relationships with consumers);
• The ability of ISPs to “retrofit” their networks for ever-increasing traffic demands in such a way that is both economically sustainable and scalable, and;
• The ability of ISPs to offer customers new “premium/express” bandwidth services that complement, rather than compete with, their current offerings.

Currently, ISPs are forced to expand their networks based on demand forecasts, with a resulting disconnect between revenues and costs, or transfer these expansion costs and future revenue streams onto third-party content distribution networks (CDNs). To complicate matters, media companies are turning to ISPs to “police” unlicensed content distribution, burdening them with the time-intensive, non-revenue generating and largely ineffective task of issuing “takedown” notices.

Our Solution: Underpin The Broadband Ecosystem Via A Trusted Clearinghouse System

nuMetra’s solution facilitates a new paradigm: from a competitive, cutthroat broadband environment to a cooperative ecosystem aimed at improving the efficiency, security and reliability of the Internet’s existing infrastructure. Rather than crafting and mandating an arbitrary set of policies to govern business relationships, nuMetra’s policies follow a substantive set of terms and procedures currently being developed and drafted by a proactive group of ISPs, media companies and technology firms through an industry association dedicated to promoting and enforcing a fair and transparent global Internet infrastructure—the InterStream Association .

In the role of third-party agent acting in the best interests of the InterStream Association’s members and participants, nuMetra’s primary services include the following:

For ISPs

• Provide technology to ISPs that enables them to sell guaranteed, “premium” levels of broadband service to customers delivered globally across the Internet (similar in concept to FedEx’s ability to guarantee “premium” delivery to its customers vs. “best-effort” delivery via the postal service);
  • Potential customers include media companies wishing to offer more of a “TV/DVD-like” quality experience to their viewers, and;
  • Other ISPs wanting to buy “premium” transit service to offer their customer base;
• Provide secured, trusted bandwidth metering and clearinghouse services to facilitate equitable and efficient “premium” transit exchanges between participating InterStream ISPs;

For Media Companies

• Provide validation to online media distributors who buy “premium” levels of broadband service from InterStream ISPs that their customers are truly receiving the guaranteed level of broadband they are paying for;
• Ensure only rightful owners of distribution rights—irrespective of an entity’s size—have access to the Internet’s “express” lanes, relegating pirates to scatter content at “best-effort” speeds, and;
• Provide practical, effective intellectual property protection and enforcement made possible through the cooperative network of united participants of the InterStream Association in tandem with technical solutions offered by nuMetra.

In summary, we are paving the way for the Internet to become a reliable, high-quality, property-protected media distribution platform to complement and augment its value as the lowest cost method of propagation available today.