Bytemobile was founded 10 years ago this June at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, by a group of professors and their graduate students. I was fortunate to be among the latter.
It was a different time. The dot.com boom was at its peak, and mobile telephone services were exploding all over the world. Wireless operators were launching commercial WAP services and had just spent themselves into debt in billion-dollar bidding wars to license 3G spectrum. The promise of mobile data was enormous, and nobody wanted to be left out.
Our small team looked beyond the primitive WAP and SMS data services of the time and envisioned an open mobile Internet. We reasoned that the mobility provided by ubiquitous 3G service would unleash the true power of the Internet, which would in turn change the way we lived and worked every day. Our vision was to build a mobile internet gateway which would enable a full multimedia web experience on any device, anywhere.
In the fallout of the subsequent dot.com bust, the commercial delivery of 3G data services was delayed significantly, and operators looked to so-called 2.5G services to bridge the gap. Our initial product was designed to optimize the performance of internet data applications on 2.5G networks - and was, in fact, an essential element of the very first GPRS and 1xRTT rollouts in Europe and the United States. Simply put, we made the Internet work on these networks by overcoming the two critical barriers to consumer adoption: speed and cost.
From 2003 to 2006, leading operators around the world gradually upgraded their networks to support 3G services. Radio bandwidth increased, 3G network coverage grew, and 3G devices became ubiquitous. Over time, our evolving technology enabled web access on billions of 2.5G and 3G laptops, smartphones and feature phones. Simultaneously, video-sharing websites like YouTube began to transform the fixed internet experience, and Apple introduced the single most disruptive handset in history. The mobile Internet that we had envisioned was becoming a reality.
With our products at the very heart of this revolution, we have been able to foresee trends emerging long before their impact would be fully felt. In 2005, we sensed an oncoming storm of video on wireless networks designed largely for voice and basic data services. In early 2006, we opened a research center in Champaign, Illinois - site of Bytemobile's founding, the invention of the World Wide Web, and one of the world's top universities for image processing research. Our new facility was focused on a single mission: to create disruptive technology for managing mobile video.
Fast forward three years. In January 2009, Cisco Systems released its annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) report, predicting the explosion of the mobile Internet. According to Cisco, this explosion will be driven by video, which will consume two-thirds of all wireless data traffic by 2013.
In December 2009, Morgan Stanley forecast that in 2010, global mobile data traffic will overtake voice traffic - with 3G coverage and video traffic as the key drivers. Morgan Stanley concluded that operators who have spent the last decade building out their networks to serve voice traffic will now need to turn traditional network design on its head and build a different kind of network to handle the torrent of video traffic fueled by the mobile Internet.
In March 2009, three years after the opening of our Champaign center - literally, thousands of R&D hours and several patents later - we launched our next-generation media optimization product. It is designed to give operators the tools they need to control video traffic and deliver a superior video experience to their subscribers, while increasing capacity and saving infrastructure costs.
Today companies are emerging out of nowhere and jumping on the mobile internet - more specifically, the mobile video - bandwagon. We have been at it for a decade now - neither following trends nor cobbling together disparate pieces of technology in an effort to keep up with the market. Throughout its history, Bytemobile has invested 20-25% of its annual revenue in product development and 10% of its R&D budget in research. As a result, we have been able to deliver solutions to the market just as the need for them emerges, rather than after the fact. From day one, we have built our business on customer intimacy and technological innovation.
Now, as you face the inevitable video tsunami, we offer you a hardened, proven, carrier-grade video optimization solution that will give you control of your traffic and keep you on high ground.
Chris Koopmans
Vice President
Product Development
