A distributed-star overnet for global business applications

Abstract

As multinational corporations capitalize on the digital economy, industry analysts are predicting that the online distribution of global business applications will have enormous appeal. Given the Internet's funding history with the US Department of Defense, multinational corporations have discovered that the architecture of the Internet which routes nearly all of the world's Internet traffic through peering points, called network access points (NAPs), does not scale to meet the requirements of increasingly complex business applications. Many companies have turned to premium, next-generation overnets to bypass public Internet congestion and get greater quality of service (QoS). The result is an improved experience for the global customer accessing a company's Web site with no time-outs or lengthy download times so end users can complete transactions for sales, customer support and other e-commerce applications. This causes increased customer retention and loyalty that successfully impact profitability. Unlike the public Internet, the success of the overnet is largely due to its innovative distributed-star architecture, which was specifically designed for global e-commerce. By comparison, the Internet was architected to withstand a nuclear attack-not to deploy business IP applications.