History

Staselog Ltd was founded in 2001 in Tampere, Finland,  to develop new type of bandwidth management devices for operators. It is owned by Atostek Ltd, its key personnel,  and private investors. It is financially supported by Tekes, Sitra and Innofinance.

Vision:  New Business Model for Broadband Operators

The broadband operators should develop and adopt a new business model according to the real market needs and terms of the on-going technological revolution. The new business model requires new broadband products which can be implemented by using new type of bandwidth management.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has a major impact to the broadband business. Today, 80% of the traffic in the Internet is P2P due to its revolutional features. It enables fast and reliable data distribution in the Internet in a very economical manner. The distribution cost is shared by all users, making it inexpensive to reach the whole globe. The bandwidth utilization is efficient in comparison to centralized servers. P2P technology and Digital Rights Management allow anybody to establish their own radio or TV station and to make business by selling independent services, thus challenging old broadcasting and media monopols. There has been a lot of illegal P2P usage violating the copyright laws and perhaps involving potential security risks. However, the legal and secure P2P service will get common and replace CD and DVD formats in entertainment business. The immaterial P2P is also well suited for wireless Internet. It will be the dominant means to implement Internet TV in a Video on Demand manner. The potential is huge in all data distribution business, not only in customer market but also in industrial and public sectors. 

There is an urgent need to reconsider P2P policy

P2P presents huge business opportunities. For consumers, P2P is the main reason to subscribe broadband. There are many appealing services available already and soon there will be many more. The operators should find a way how to make money with P2P and support it. Instead, the operators are currently reducing P2P traffic due to technical congestion problems. The encrypted P2P (darknets) will get common in late 2005. This will make P2P identification and reduction impossible using deep packet inspection at network Layer 7. The operator are forced to reconsider their P2P policy. 

The P2P application developers are selling services directly to consumers, thus bypassing operators in the value chain. Operators are still needed for simple data transmission, which is a low-profit business area. The operators should provide more valuable service to the customers in order to increase the profit factor. This can be accomplished by providing more sophisticated service in association with P2P application developers and the media industry.

The cheapest broadband subscription is selling well, because the subscribers see hardly any difference between the cheapest and the more expensive choices. These are sold as technical connections with different theoretical top speed, which is not guaranteed. The profit margin islow and it takes one year to compensate the cost for hooking up a new subscriber. More sophisticated produts are required to improve the situation.

The proposed business model for consumer broadband

The operators should revise their business model in order to stay competetive. Instead of technical connections, the service aspect should be emphasized. We propose the following measures to be taken. 

1. Offer more sophisticated products with low entry price and optional customized service. The low entry price is required in order to be competetive in price and to attract a new customer segment. The customized options are required to make sure that the real needs of each customer are addressed and the customers get real value for their money. It also enables charging gradually (pay-per-use)  according to the desired service quality and quantity in each case of actual network usage.
2. Make sure that the subscribers have the best possible quality for P2P instead restrictions. Ensure high quality for all users.
3. Actively support easy access to P2P services. The easiest way is the most popular way. All customers are not engineers.
4. Actively support access to legal P2P services. This is required to protect the customers against the risk of unintentionally breaking the copyright laws.
5. Actively support secure and trusted P2P services. This is to avoid security risks, such as unintentionally sharing confidential information or getting worms and viruses.
6. Start cooperation with media industry, P2P application developers and other third party to market, sell, and distribute the service based on P2P-technology. The new applications will keep the customers interested to subscribe and use the network. The interactive multimedia applications require high quality and help selling the options. 
7. Integrate wired and wireless Internet to allow easy and mobile access to all services. Use wideband wireless technology to ensure high quality live video.
8. All the available bandwidth should be in in use. Thus, the whole capital investment in bandwidth is in productive use and gives the best possible service quality. Increase the connection rates of each subscriber to the maximum and oversubscribe network uplink capacity by up to factor 1000.
9. Save costs by automatisation and let the subscribers themselves modify their subscriptions. Further cost savings can be obtained by optimizing the traffic routing according to the lowest cost.
10. Apply sophisticated bandwidth management to solve the congestion problems and sell high priority and guaranteed quality of service instead of top speed.