On May 11, Mobile Minute teamed with Informa Telecoms & Media to stage its second webinar of the 2010 season – “Meeting Consumer Expectations of the Mobile Internet Experience”. You can access a full replay of the webinar here and on the Mobile Minute page of our website.

The event drew approximately 500 registrants from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America, the U.S., and Canada. Attendees included a cross-section of wireless network operators and other mobile ecosystem participants.

The webinar panel consisted of Dez O’Connor, head of Mobile ISP Domain Development at T-Mobile International (Deutsche Telekom); Mike Hibberd, editorial director of Telecoms.com; and Jeff Sanderson, head of Pre-Sales for EMEA and Latin America at Bytemobile.

As moderator, Mike Hibberd led off the discussion with a litany of compelling statistics regarding the growth of mobile broadband subscribers worldwide – from 450 million this year to 670 million next year – and its impact on network congestion and traffic patterns. He cited the experience of O2 UK in managing its iPhone subscriber base – with traffic volume doubling every three months – and TeliaSonera in its implementation of 4G technology and associated customer feedback regarding network performance and quality of service. Hibberd also emphasized the influence of video usage on traffic growth, quoting Cisco Systems’ forecast that multimedia will account for 90% of all wireless data traffic by 2013.

Next, representing a tier-one operator’s perspective, Dez O’Connor talked about the critical importance of intelligent traffic management in return on investment in major network deployments. He echoed Hibberd’s comments about video being the key driver of traffic growth and stressed the value of identifying and addressing ‘congestion hotspots’ in the network. O’Connor called out several techniques for improving network efficiency – packet dropping and shaping, traffic control by tariff and content enforcement, traffic compression and acceleration (optimization), Quality of Service (QoS) as defined in the 3GPP architectural model, and intelligent traffic off-load. He concluded that the timely, selective application of these techniques will enable operators to deliver the best customer experience at the best price – based on a manageable cost structure.

Jeff Sanderson rounded out the panel with a focus on video optimization as a means of sustaining network capacity through explosive traffic growth while controlling infrastructure build-out. He indicated that operators can achieve a more ‘deterministic’ user experience by directly addressing network congestion and its impact on quality and usability. Sanderson discussed just-in-time video delivery and the respective and combined merits of lossless and lossy optimization to reduce video stalling and enable operators to offer differentiated services. He concluded with a summary of the key attributes of smart optimization for multiple traffic types – perpetual value through subsequent generations of networks, especially 4G; dynamic adaptation to change; and a consistently positive experience for both operators and their customers.

Additional Mobile Minute events are being planned for the coming months. We will cover these events on our blog and website as part of our ongoing efforts to provide thought leadership and consultative education to the rapidly evolving mobile internet space.

-Jaishree Subramania

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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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