Don’t Let Video Stall Your Network!
Sunday, February 6th, 2011Bytemobile’s Mobile Minute Metrics reports over the last five quarters show that video became the dominant form of mobile data traffic in 2010 – accounting for an average of 40% of the total volume in wireless networks worldwide. With the rise of full-length and studio-quality videos and live streaming of multimedia content on mobile devices – as well as the emergence of personal two-way video communications, or “video chat” – Bytemobile expects mobile data traffic to spike to an all-time high in 2011, causing tremendous capacity strain on already challenged network resources.
Bytemobile anticipates the following developments in the coming year:
- Video-based content will account for over 60% of network traffic – up from 40% in 2010 – and two-way video chat will dominate network capacity
- 10% of subscribers will generate 90% of total network traffic
- Pressure on capacity will continue to increase with LTE and other 4G network roll-outs, due to subscriber consumption of all available bandwidth
The growth of video traffic is rapidly outpacing that of overall data traffic. Unless operators are able to intelligently manage network capacity through data reduction and related technologies, the explosion of multimedia content will continue to erode their monetization of data services.
Last month, The New York Times reported that people watched 60 billion videos on YouTube each month — or 730 billion videos throughout the year. The average Internet user watched 186 videos each month. The same week that the article appeared, YouTube announced that 200 million videos per day are being played on mobile devices – up 300% from January 2010.
Video stalling due to network congestion is becoming a non-stop condition, eliminating the concept of the “busy hour” and severely impacting customer satisfaction and churn.
Source: Bytemobile Mobile Minute Metrics
A small increase in video resolution results in a significant increase in data traffic.
Increased demand on capacity requires greater control of networks and the ability to measure the quality of subscribers’ mobile video experience. Operators need to monitor data rates, resolution and stalling in order to ensure service quality and consistency, reduce churn, and plan tiered services for different subscriber profiles. Operators will continue to implement various data offload and small cell technologies to meet escalating demand. They will also deploy “Smart Capacity” solutions in their networks to better utilize existing capacity and increase customer satisfaction.
Download Volumes Reduced by 40-60%
Smart Capacity at the core of networks enables operators to control and reduce the total amount of multimedia traffic on the network, thereby improving the user experience during periods of congestion and increasing network efficiencies. By dynamically controlling network capacity utilization, operators can deliver the best possible user experience under network conditions and congestion patterns at any point in time.
Live customer deployments have shown that Smart Capacity solutions can reduce network download volumes by 40-60% – decreasing the cost of content delivery while improving the overall economics of mobile video and other data services offered by operators. A Smart Capacity platform is designed to help operators reduce network costs – capex and opex – by improving utilization of existing network capacity. It is also designed to help them increase revenue by serving more content to more subscribers and delivering a better user experience to reduce churn. Yield management and content policy enforcement capabilities enable operators to plan and implement tiered service plans for monetizing traffic by subscriber usage.
Smart Capacity at the Core of 3G and 4G Networks
Even with the migration from 3G to 4G networks – or RAN and backhaul upgrades to 3G networks – demand on capacity for multimedia traffic will continue to increase. Taking advantage of new content, applications and devices, subscribers will consume all available bandwidth and still expect the same quality of service that came with their original service plans – if not better. One U.S. operator is currently processing an average of 7GB per subscriber per month. Another operator in the Scandinavian countries is moving 17GB per subscriber per month. This trend will continue as live streaming video broadcasts and video on-demand go mainstream.
Smart Capacity has the potential to change the operational paradigm for mobile networks as traffic volumes continue to accelerate. Carriers will be able to deliver the highest-quality video and web content now and keep pace with exponential increases in demand – driven by progressively richer and more complex applications, as well as rapidly growing consumer adoption. This will help operators not only maximize the return on their infrastructure investment, but also capitalize on revenue opportunities that require delivery of the most sophisticated content with a leading-edge user experience. In the not so distant future, terabyte will become part of people’s everyday vocabulary – and yottabyte a standard metric for baseline network capacity.
-Ronny Haraldsvik
