KUALA LUMPUR, 26 AUGUST – The Internet has come a long way since its inception into the public realm in the early 1990s, and has enjoyed its status as the information superhighway ever since. However, its role has changed in recent years with the culmination of high-quality media traversing through both private and public networks. With online streaming and video-conferencing (VC) on the rise, the current data network infrastructure is finding it difficult to cope with the explosion of media-rich content, resulting in a series of issues, ranging from packet loss to high latencies.

Allen Young, CTO for Cisco Systems in the Asia-Pacific region, explained in a Telepresence video-conferencing session from Singapore that the corporation predicted the global Internet Protocol (IP) and video communication traffic to increase by five and ten-fold respectively by the year 2013, and expected video to take up 90% of all traffic by 2012.

Closer to home, the 2008 Internet Survey done by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) stated that 63.5% of households in Malaysia use the Internet for leisure, which marks a more-than 10% growth since the year 2007. Cisco also ranked Malaysia third in a survey out of 52 countries that spent more than 20 hours a week watching or streaming online media.

Cisco has decided to launch its medianet strategy in the country -the first official launch of its kind in Asia- which will include technologies and solutions to optimize IP networks for rich media. Service providers around the world such as MTV Networks, i-CABLE in Hong Kong and Numericable in France have already begun implementing medianet technologies.

“We believe that Malaysia is ready for this transformation of its network. We're going to invite the broadcasting type companies and service providers over, create the awareness, and show them how our technology is going to enable this medianet, and see if we can work with them on their own vision,” said Anne Abraham, Managing Director of Cisco Malaysia.

An example of a medianet in action is when there are many people asking for the same online video stream. In a normal scenario, each user will be provided with a separate stream based on available resources. A medianet on the other hand emulates the characteristics of an intelligent, adaptive network, and will take into account not only the quality of the media being transmitted, but also the type of device and what kind of bandwidth the client is using.

When asked how the medianet infrastructure was going to be implemented in the country given its current status, Mr Young replied, “Telekom Malaysia and other service providers are going to have to be acutely aware of this business opportunity and take advantage of it. We are trying to promote the idea that end consumers are pushing for this transformation.”

One of the concerns that Cisco Systems highlighted during the meeting would be the issue of no traffic with the medianet in place, and as such is currently moving to make sure that it would be fully utilized, adding that that the implementation of the High-Speed Broadband (HSBB) plan was critical to the medianet strategy.