We’ve been working with China Mobile for several years on reducing network data volume and improving the consumer experience. Recently, the Bytemobile Customer Marketing Services team was able to help Jiangsu Mobile – the second largest of China Mobile’s provincial operators, with 30.2 million subscribers – with more than mobile internet solutions.

Jiangsu Mobile had deployed its breakthrough web browsing service for handsets - called Open-Surf and powered by our content adaptation technology. The operator was looking to accelerate the expansion of the service province-wide, so subscribers could access their favorite brands and websites on their existing WAP handsets.

While promoting the service through SMS, MMS and its website – www.js.chinamobile.com – Jiangsu Mobile was seeking alternative methods to illustrate the value of the new, innovative service, while demonstrating key features to entice younger consumers to use the service.

We worked closely with the Jiangsu Mobile marketing team to understand the local market, subscriber behavior and the operator’s core brand values. Following a thorough information exchange, we internalized these fundamentals to develop compelling promotional ideas while leveraging Bytemobile’s experience in deploying mobile internet services around the globe.

Once the market landscape was fully understood, we went to work, evaluating alternative media for the challenge. We chose video due to the ease of viral propagation through social media. After Jiangsu Mobile agreed, we quickly drafted a video script and storyboard, secured customer approval, and proceeded to manage production from start to finish.

Following the completion and acceptance of the video, the Jiangsu Mobile team has utilized it in a number of promotional campaigns across the province. The result? A satisfied customer with increased consumer awareness and a measurable rise in Open-Surf subscribers.

- Dan Fisher

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Image courtesy of Dustin D’Amour via the Creative Commons attribution license.

Some thoughts on Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Palm:

Palm, a pioneer in the smartphone business, was acquired for $1.2 billion by Hewlett-Packard this week. With this deal, the battle of the smartphone market just got edgier and more interesting. Responding to questions on the announcement, Vice President of Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Systems Group Todd Bradley said the market for mobile phones is “large, profitable and growing.” HP sees smartphones as a “very early stage market” and wants to compete with its own product.

Check out the live blog on HP’s announcement at The Wall Street Journal.

Initial media reactions:

Long story short, HP just (re)entered the mobile space in a major way. And look for webOS eventually to be used across the range of HP products. – TechCrunch

It's clear that smartphones are becoming better and better at replacing full-fledged computers for many tasks, and Dell and HP clearly don't want to be forgotten when everyone is debating Andoid or iPhone with the same vigor once saved for OS X vs. Windows. We say: Bring it on. - Switched

-Subhi Andrews

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Image courtesy of NateKlaiber via the Creative Commons attribution license.

By now, the story of the ‘stolen’ iPhone has made several rounds in technology circle. For those of you who are curious as to what might be next up from Apple, the folks at Gizmodo, who had access to the iPhone 4G, might be able to shed some light. Given Apple’s track record of keeping its customers delighted, consumers are likely to lap up whatever Apple dishes out in the next iPhone.

Expected highlights:

● Front-facing camera – which would hint at video-calling as the future of the iPhone

● iChat - the next YouChat
            -Back-porting of iChat to older iPhones
            -iChat compatibility with desktops and the Apple iPad
            -Desktop compatibility for connection with anyone, without a special plan
            -Desktop version of iChat including text and voice chatting

So what does this mean for network operators? In one word, it means traffic – gobs of it – pumping through the overworked arteries of the mobile Internet.

And, as devices continually get ‘smarter’, carriers can surely expect yet another explosion in video and other multimedia traffic. With its market-leading Media Optimization solution, Bytemobile is ahead of the curve in helping operators tackle this challenge.

-Subhi Andrews

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The release of Apple’s iPad marks the introduction of a new class of device into wireless networks. While on the surface, the iPad looks like an iPhone in larger form, the bigger screen also enables richer applications.

Richer applications equate to more content, graphics, larger and higher-resolution images, etc. - which generate more data traffic on operators’ networks. Recent tests by Bytemobile show that applications on the iPad generate more than 150% of the data generated by the same apps on the iPhone.

Highlights of the Apple iPad test, by popular application, are as follows:

Source: Bytemobile

The actual data consumed by these applications is likely to be far larger since a better user experience will encourage longer usage periods - thereby generating even more data. 

Less than three weeks after its launch, Apple’s iPad already accounts for 26% of the mobile devices accessing the popular website Wired.com.

Source: Wired.com

This couldn’t come at a more sensitive time for operators already struggling to keep up with demand from smartphones and laptops. In the short term, operators are responding with large capital investments in network infrastructure. However, this is hardly sustainable with the pricing of data services dropping relative to the volume of data generated by the devices. For example, an unlimited data plan for the iPhone and the iPad are priced the same at $30 a month, while data consumption for the iPad is going to be more than double that for the iPhone. Further, there are currently no fair-use limits on the iPad plan, which could encourage runaway data consumption for users so inclined. In addition, the operators’ price wars limit the sustainability of large network expenditures in keeping up with overall traffic growth.

The fundamental reality is that network capacity is a constrained resource - even with technological advances and infrastructure expansion investments. However, capacity is not a problem everywhere in the network and at all times of the day. Capacity becomes a problem when congestion occurs in crowded cells and during peak usage hours. Managing congestion solves a large part of the problem for operators.

Bytemobile’s optimization solutions are a critical tools used by operators to manage network congestion. Optimization helps alleviate congestion by reducing data volume in the network and thereby improve the user experience. Optimization also detects the occurrence of congestion by monitoring connections and traffic in the data path. Finally, optimization reduces congestion using various techniques that streamline data flow and reduce bandwidth waste.

By acting as a proxy, these solutions are able to dynamically determine both the amount of bandwidth available and the amount required by the application in use. This information is intelligently combined with knowledge of the priority of various traffic flows to provide the best possible experience for the maximum number of users. As a result, operators can support the adoption of bandwidth-hungry devices like the iPad without unsustainable network expenditures. 

-Girish Wadhwani

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