An article written by Joel Brand, vice president of Product Management at Bytemobile,  was published by Wireless Week today. The article builds the case for why data traffic optimization will join the portfolio of wireless infrastructure solutions – including LTE, WiMAX, femtocells, and other technologies – that will enable operators to profitably sustain traffic growth now and in the future.

The article as it appeared in Wireless Week:

Highway Congestion: The Case for Optimization

The United States has the most advanced highway system in the world — today's equivalent of 4G/LTE networks of the wireless world — yet my commute on a terribly congested six-lane highway is still a miserable experience.

Even with metering lights, carpool lanes, reversible lanes that carry traffic in different directions based on time of day, detours around excessive congestion due to special events, speed traps and other police presence to ensure orderly traffic flow, tolls like those charged on most bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area, congestion-charging like that implemented in central London, and other techniques to reduce congestion — there is still heavy traffic where most of us want to go and when we want to go there.

Like a highway that is tightly tucked between a mountain cliff and a lake or an ocean, wireless networks are subject to limitations due to a similar lack of a physical resource — namely, wireless spectrum. Like congested road systems in highly populated metropolitan areas, wireless networks are unequally taxed by a large concentration of users. Just as it is impractical to widen downtown city streets by removing apartment complexes and residents, wireless service cannot be built out endlessly by laying cables, installing towers and placing radiating antennas on the balcony of every user's home. One way or another, we need to share the wireless spectrum and the data pipe it offers, just as we share the public road and highway systems. And if operators ignore the devastating effects of mobile data congestion, we will all end up with a very frustrating and possibly unusable wireless service.

NO PANACEA
No single fourth-generation technology — such as LTE or WiMAX — will be a panacea for the traffic jam caused by the mobile data explosion. Yet, there are those who tout LTE as the ultimate solution for limitless capacity. Regardless of the size of the pipe, data usage will inevitably rise to fill the bandwidth available for it.

This is not the case in the wireline (DSL and cable) networks. These networks are over-provisioned to ensure high-quality delivery that allows consumers to watch television programs and listen to radio stations over the Internet.

The availability of wireless spectrum is neither increasing nor limitless. Spectral efficiency - how many bits can be transmitted over a frequency band - is bounded by Shannon's Law and is already approaching its limit with the introduction of LTE. Annual global mobile data traffic has increased 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes), and the average mobile broadband connection that currently generates 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month is projected to generate 7 gigabytes per month by 2014. As a result, wireless networks cannot be over-provisioned.

Data usage will continue to stretch available bandwidth, even in a 4G environment. Every available hertz of spectrum must be optimally utilized.

Building additional lanes, bridges, overpasses and on-/off-ramps is necessary and certainly helpful in minimizing congestion, yet none of these improvements will completely eliminate traffic problems. LTE is like the highway system — it must be built wide enough to service the demand of the population using it. However, the move to LTE isn't a cure-all — without additional tools to manage the traffic, all lanes will come to a standstill.

Thankfully, there are companies developing the equivalent of metering lights, carpool lanes, toll charges and other techniques to minimize congestion. Femtocells, Wi-Fi offload, MIMO and directional antennas and optimization solutions will be critical components of future wireless communication systems, enabling operators to deliver a high-quality user experience with a limited set of resources in the form of spectrum and radio technology.

OPTIMIZATION'S ENDURING VALUE
Optimization in mathematical terms refers to choosing the best element from a selection of available alternatives. In our highway system, it is a one-dimensional problem: choosing the best path from origin to destination (and make no mistake about it — this is an extremely complex problem). In the wireless data system, it is a multi-dimensional problem: choosing the right mix of content to deliver to end users at any given moment and thereby maximize everyone's experience.

With LTE pushing the boundaries of spectrum utilization and spectrum allocation becoming ever more challenging, the only variable left to control is the content. Optimization is the only technique that can actually modify data — it can compress data or remove unnecessary components like the tail end of a movie clip that the user decides to skip. It can reduce data by adjusting multimedia content to the capabilities of the device on which it is displayed, and when congestion is detected, it can intelligently decide how to prioritize content based on its characteristics.

Actually, optimization is the only technique that can detect congestion and act upon detecting it. Optimization algorithms have visibility into unacknowledged packets, round-trip delays and lost packets to determine at any given moment the level of congestion experienced by every individual user. The combination of this information with knowledge of the radio network topology — basically, the cell site where users are served — can be used to proactively apply optimization algorithms ensuring that all users receive an appropriate share of network resources base on rate plans and the resources available in the operator's network.

Optimization works. In Germany and the U.K., for example, independent consumer research organizations have tested and compared wireless networks. Operators that have deployed optimization technologies consistently rank at the top of the list in terms of their network quality. And because smart optimization techniques evolve to match current network realities, adjust to changing consumer content preferences and readily adapt to the latest mobile devices, they continue to deliver a positive experience for both operators and their customers, and they will continue to be part of future 4G deployments.

Joel Brand is vice president of product management at Bytemobile, where he is responsible for managing and marketing the company's portfolio of wireless data optimization, traffic management and mobile Internet solutions.

Image courtesy of Seattle Miles via the Creative Commons attribution license.

-Stacey Infantino

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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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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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Our usage of wireless data increases about 10% every month. Thankfully, our bills don’t increase 10% every month. Good for us – bad for the wireless network operators.

So what are the operators doing about it? Remember the unlimited ‘all-you-can-eat’ data plans offered by virtually every carrier? Well…read the fine print. There is an upper limit to the ‘unlimited’ data that you can consume. Some operators would completely block your data access once you had reached the cap. Others would simply charge an outrageous amount for the excess data over the cap that you had consumed. Still others would apply technology - such as rate-shaping of traffic - to degrade your quality of service and make your experience so unbearable that you’d stop downloading all those YouTube videos. These techniques are designed to decrease the total traffic in the network so that operators can serve existing users cost-effectively and pursue new data subscriptions – both of which are mandatory to sustain profitability.

Clearly, these ‘solutions’ are not ideal because of their negative impact on the user experience. Consumers become confused and frustrated, which defeats the original purpose of increasing the operator’s profitability. Consequently, operators are looking for other ways to lower the cost per bit transmitted over the wireless network in order to profitably serve the growing demand for mobile data. For example, many operators are experimenting with femtocells - little base stations that sit next to your Wi-Fi access point at home – or even Wi-Fi radio, which is supported right in the phone. Both solutions are designed to offload wireless data (and voice) onto existing (i.e., cheaper) fixed-line networks to serve users while they are at home or work, thereby reducing traffic on the wireless network. The bad news is that both solutions are complex – and require a change in user behavior.

That leaves us with the most obvious solution – make the wireless network less expensive to operate – which is why operators are planning to roll out LTE (Long-Term Evolution) networks. LTE is a great solution. Its spectral efficiency is roughly four times that of existing HSDPA technology. This means that for every bit transmitted over an existing network, LTE would allow four bits to be transmitted, thus reducing the cost per bit by a factor of four. Put another way, it would enable operators to serve four users at the current cost of serving a single user. Fantastic, right? What better reason for operators around the world to spend years in planning and billions in acquiring spectrum, radio infrastructure and cell towers - and even more years and billions in deploying and rolling out the technology. The savings on existing users’ traffic would be enormous, and the potential revenue from growth in data subscriptions would be even more substantial.

Of course, we can’t forget about the ‘years’ and ‘billions’ required before this is a reality. Did you know that the combined power of Bytemobile’s optimization solutions can reduce the cost per bit by as much as a factor of two? That’s 50% of the value of LTE - and it costs a fraction of LTE in terms of cash and management and deployment time. The principle is simple – rather than optimizing the way the radio uses the spectrum, Bytemobile solutions optimize users’ data. This means that they work on today’s network, require no changes in user behavior and actually improve the user experience – all the while reducing the cost per bit. No wonder Bytemobile has over 100 wireless operators worldwide as deployed customers.

Optimization is yet another solution available to operators in their attempt to increase utilization of available bandwidth and reduce the cost per bit. Operators will continue to invest in optimization for as long as they continue to invest in better radio technologies – and as long as users demand higher levels of service.

The relentless pressure to decrease costs, increase subscriptions and revenue, and improve the user experience not only demands optimization solutions today, but will also demand optimization solutions in the future LTE environment, and will further demand optimization solutions if and when 5G radio technology is invented. After all, the same forces that drive operators’ investment in radio technology also drive their investment in optimization.

-Joel Brand

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