Michelle Sklar of bnetTV interviewed Joel Brand, vice president of Product Management at Bytemobile, at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2009. In this video clip from the show floor, Brand discusses the impact that mobile video has had on operators’ networks and makes the case for why video optimization will join the portfolio of wireless infrastructure solutions – including web optimization, LTE, WiMAX, femtocells, and other technologies – that will enable operators to profitably sustain traffic growth now and into the future.

See the entire interview below.

For more information on Bytemobile’s Media Optimization solutions, click here.

-Stacey Infantino

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As complaints from frustrated customers indicate, wireless carriers are struggling to keep up with their users’ seemingly insatiable appetite for data. Networks are stressed due to the huge and ever growing popularity of smartphones such as the iPhone and computing devices such as netbooks, USB ‘dongles’ for mobile broadband access, and video-intensive applications.

There are many ways that carriers are attempting to tackle this problem, including acquiring more bandwidth in the form of spectrum and building out 4G network infrastructure. In the short term, some operators are also using technology to “optimize” web and video content for access via mobile devices.

To find out whether optimization has a measurable impact on the customer experience, Informa Telecoms and Media, a leading industry market research company, conducted an extensive study comparing the performance of mobile broadband across leading U.K. wireless providers including O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, BT, Vodafone, and H3G. From June to August 2009, a series of tests were performed in and around London, measuring the download performance of several popular internet destinations including Amazon, Facebook, Lycos, and Starbucks.

Informa’s measurements illustrate that T-Mobile and O2 (which both use Bytemobile’s solution), BT (which uses Vodafone’s network) and Vodafone were consistently the smallest in webpage download size and in 80% of measurements were the fastest to complete the download.

As a result of its findings, Informa concluded that enhancing an existing network - whether via 2G, 2.5G or 3G - with an optimization solution produces results that are not achievable via any other upgrades with a similar level of financial investment.

Interestingly, the results of this study echo the findings of YouGov’s recent survey, in which U.K. mobile users ranked their satisfaction with providers’ data download speeds.

Download the Informa report for free at http://www.telecoms.com/category/format/informa-white-papers.

-Graham Carey

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AT&T’s making MMS available on the iPhone is big news – something for which its users have clamored. Of course, AT&T isn’t the only carrier that is concerned about how to make sure its network is prepared for an increase in multimedia traffic. To better understand why carriers are justifiably nervous, let’s take a look at the following data which represents traffic over a 24-hour period in a cross-section of some of our larger customers’ 3G networks.

Note that 90% of the users are browsing the web, which accounts for 40-50% of the total traffic.

Streaming video accounts for 30-40%, but that is generated by less than 1% of the users. It’s not difficult to do the math and envision the magnitude of the impact as more users consume video and other multimedia applications.

P2P file sharing is also a bandwidth hog, with less than 1/10 of 1% of users accounting for 5-10% of the total traffic.

It is clear that intelligent traffic control is necessary, enabling carriers to enforce fair use policies adaptively without damaging customer relationships. By increasing network efficiency and capacity, operators can manage the effects of continued traffic growth within the footprint of their existing installation and scale their networks ahead of rising data usage trends. This will also help to ensure a compelling user experience.

-Stacey Infantino

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Bytemobile Chief Marketing Officer Adrian Hall delivered a presentation on “Intelligent Traffic Management in the 4G Environment” today at the LTE Focus conference. In the session, Hall discussed Bytemobile’s first-hand experience in helping network operators successfully migrate from 2G to 2.5G to 3G and demonstrated how experience has shown that intelligent traffic management will be more critical in the 4G environment than ever before.

Highlights from Hall’s presentation included:
Over the next five years, the majority of users will be on the highest-speed networks – which will effectively reduce or minimize the impact of user-experience issues on data consumption and therefore generate more and more traffic.

Moore’s Law is every bit as applicable to wireless network traffic as it is to semiconductor processing power – and data usage will inevitably rise to fill the bandwidth available for it. This has happened in every phase of the evolution of network technology – from 2G to 2.5G to 3G – and it will happen from 3G to 4G as well.

Solutions for Operators:
They can apply different strategies for intelligent traffic management – such as imposing data caps on service plans, enforcing fair-use policies to limit the impact of excessive usage by a few rogue subscribers, and differentiate quality of service based on premium pricing.

They can implement web optimization technology to reduce data volume and media optimization technology to manage bandwidth utilization for streaming video.

They can also deploy new value-added data services to build new business models and generate new revenue streams to offset the impact of margin pressure with increased revenue.

Interested in hearing more? Send an email to sinfantino@bytemobile.com.

-Stacey Infantino

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