Joel Brand, Bytemobile vice president of Product Management, was a guest at the TMC Executive Editorial Event in San Jose, CA. Brand spent the morning with senior members of TMC’s editorial and executive teams, participating in high-level discussions on the state of mobile data and Bytemobile’s role in the industry.  

Brand met with Erik Linask, group editorial director, TMC; Carl Ford, co-founder and vice president, Community Development, 4G Wireless Evolution; and Jim Spangenberg, director of Web Events, Internet Telephony. The discussion focused on the challenges facing wireless network operators – including network congestion, the user experience and subscriber churn – and provided an in-depth look at how Bytemobile’s optimization and policy control solutions enable its customers to address these challenges.

Brand also participated in a video interview with Rich Tehrani, CEO and group editor-in-chief, TMC. Be sure to check back for the clip, once the video has been posted live.

-Stacey Infantino

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Recognizing companies, individuals and technologies that have shaped the way in which the world communicates, the 2010 Mobile Merit Awards winners were announced this week.  

Bytemobile’s Media Optimization solution was selected for an Award of Excellence in the Mobile Technologies Infrastructure category.

                                                  
Through nominations, the Mobile Merit Awards note the excellence achieved in the global mobile industry. This year’s winners were judged based on industry impact, innovation, technologies, social importance, implementation, and overall success factor.

Bytemobile’s field-proven media optimization solution dramatically improves consumers’ mobile video experience while significantly reducing data traffic in the wireless network.

To read the public announcement, click here.

For more information on the Mobile Merit Awards, click here.

-Stacey Infantino

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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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