Media network as a service

The videoconferencing industry is undergoing the most substantial change in a decade. Demand for advanced collaboration functionality and the highest quality of media presentation is meeting the requirement for Internet-based "over the top" communication, allowing unlimited communication between the organizations and individuals. We claim that these two contradictory requirements are best conciliated through deployment of a cloud service with elements of Network and Infrastructure as a Service required to support global videoconferencing. The operational architecture we present enjoys the full benefits of the cloud networking model, including elastic scaling, on-demand resource availability, and a no-capex service model. The videoconferencing infrastructure requirements on the application level, and the quality requirements on the network level, are addressed in the single platform, opening new optimization possibilities. We describe the network-level wide-area routing and service discovery mechanisms we have deployed to improve the videoconferencing user experience through reduction of communication delay and packet loss. We further describe the service economy model, discussing the key trade-offs relevant for network cloud operations.