Saturday, November 30, 2013

[Infonetics]: Wan Optimization Market Declining; Riverbed Dominates


A recent report by Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud, Infonetics Research, finds that "Though WAN optimization revenue increased 3% sequentially in 3Q13, to $210 million, it remains on an overall downhill course, with revenue falling 9% year-over-year this quarter. Future WAN optimization revenue will increasingly come from the replacement of existing gear rather than adoption by new customers or sites. As usual, Riverbed dominates the WAN optimization market, Cisco is firmly in 2nd place, and Blue Coat rounds out the top 3". 

See "Virtual solutions open door for growth in application delivery controller market" - here.

Friday, November 29, 2013

EU Courts can Order ISPs to Block Copyright Infringement Sites


The EU's Advocate General’s Opinion says that ".. Member States are to ensure that copyright holders or holders of related rights are able to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe their rights .. It is already established that internet providers can in principle be regarded as intermediaries and therefore as persons against which such injunctions, which are aimed at bringing to an end infringements already committed and at preventing further infringements, can be granted. In practice, the operators of illegal websites and the internet providers which make them available online are frequently based outside Europe or conceal their identity, making it difficult to pursue them before the courts".

"In his Opinion today, Advocate General Pedro Cruz Villalón [pictured] takes the view that the internet provider of the user of a website which infringes copyright is also to be regarded as an intermediary whose services are used by a third party – that is the operator of the website - to infringe copyright and therefore also as a person against whom an injunction can be granted. That is apparent from the wording, context, spirit and purpose of the provision of EU law".

See also "There is always another Way to Download" - here.

See "According to Advocate General Cruz Villalón an internet provider can be required to block access by its customers to a website which infringes copyright" - here.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

Sandvine - $4M Orders from a New LATAM Mobile Group Customer


Sandvine announced that it has "..received initial orders exceeding $4 million from several properties of a Tier 1 mobile service provider group that operates in most countries across Latin America .. This new customer will be deploying Sandvine’s Network Analytics product across group properties to provide actionable business intelligence about popular applications, devices and network quality. The information can be easily compared and contrasted between networks and regions, and to support business and operational decisions for the future".

Sandvine is a long time supplier to the Telefonica group (see "Sandvine CEO: "Telefonica and Comcast - Lion's Share of Revenues"; May Consider Small Acquisitions" - here) - but the above announcement describes the operator as a new customer.

See "Sandvine Wins Tier 1 Latin American Mobile Operator Group" - here.

VAS/Security Deployments [275]: Singtel Uses Fortinet to Protect Enterprise Customers


Fortinet announced that it has ".. partnered with SingTel to immediately roll out secured broadband services to enterprises across Singapore. Running on Fortinet's high performance FortiGate® network security platforms and FortiManager® and FortiAnalyzer® centralised management and reporting appliances, the SingTel Business Fibre Broadband Security Suite intercepts security threats and eliminates them in the cloud before they reach a company's IT network. Businesses subscribed to this Suite will have online content filtering bundled with their broadband access. Antivirus and anti-spam protection can be added as options. Besides improving security, the content filtering and anti-spam functions help businesses optimise bandwidth usage and increase staff productivity".

Mr Goh Boon Huat [pictured], VP Business Products, Global Products, SingTel Group Enterprise said: “The SingTel Business Fibre Broadband Security Suite is tailor-made for SMEs, which have little or no IT support. Having a reliable, convenient and automated cloud security enables them to protect their vulnerable IT networks from internal and external threats. Our SME customers can enjoy a secured Internet network allowing them to focus on their business, enhance customer experience and drive new revenue growth,"


See "SingTel and Fortinet Partner to Provide Secured Broadband Services to Businesses" - here.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

[Infonetics]: VoLTE is the Accelerator for an Expected $1.9B SDM Market (2017)


A recent report by Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence, Infonetics Research finds that "After several years on the back burner, the concept of the user data repository, where subscriber data is consolidated in a centralized repository, is finally taking off .. Use cases such as revenue assurance, churn management, and opex savings have long been drivers behind user data repository spending, but voice over LTE (VoLTE) has proven to be a real accelerator, as has interest in leveraging subscriber data to better enable monetization of the network


"The global subscriber data management market is forecast by Infonetics to grow to $1.9 billion by 2017, fueled by the big data trend". This is a small increase from Infonetics' May forecast - "SDM Market Looks for Strong Analytics; to Reach $1.8B by 2017" - here but still lower compared to 2012 forecasts "SDM Market to Reach $1.9B by 2016; Oracle and Amdocs Compete" - here 

See "VoLTE, personalization and monetization powering momentum in subscriber data management" - here.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Special Post: My City, Tel Aviv


Sights of my home town, Tel Aviv. By Noam Armonn.



Bandwidth on Demand - "will not necessary translate to additional, new near-term revenue"


During the years I had a number of posts covering the "Bandwidth on Demand" (BoD) use-case for traffic management - either as a vendor pitch or actual deployments. BoD has several formats - increasing the bit-rate for a limited period of time (known as "Turbo Boost" or "Turbo Button") with or without "special QoS" for a certain application (video) or top-up the quota (related to usage-based billing),

Some examples - "Tekelec's PCRF Used with Verizon's "Turbo Button" API", "Allot: $3M Order for Charging, Bandwidth on Demand and Analytics", "C Spire Wireless [US] Deploys Shared Data Plans and BoD with Openwave Mobility", "tw Telecom: Case Studies for Bandwidth on-Demand", "Maxis [Malaysia] Uses Cisco, Huawei and BroadHop", "Network Norway Tries Every Possible Use-case w/Tango Telecom", "Leap Wireless to Add Bandwidth on Demand Service; Shows LTE Roadmap" and more.

All looks good? maybe not. A recent report (here) by Steve Koppman [pictures],Analyst at Large, Heavy Reading finds that "Dynamic bandwidth service capabilities like bandwidth-on-demand will not necessary translate to additional, new near-term revenue for service providers .. However, the report also finds that other benefits of bandwidth-on-demand, such as the ability to provide guaranteed bandwidth and predictable bills, make it an effective customer loyalty tool. Also, dynamic bandwidth capabilities are likely to become more of a future requirement for service providers in increasingly virtualized environments".

See "Bandwidth-On-Demand May Not Add Revenue" - here

Monday, November 25, 2013

[Guest Post]: Femtocells, LTE and the Move to Personalization – The Evolution of Policy

By Martin Morgan*, Director of Marketing, Openet

At the start of November this year, leading market research firm Infonetics released their survey on operators’ residential femtocell strategies. According to Infonetics, “operators are currently focused on quality of experience, leveraging femtos to deliver 5-bar voice coverage in the home and provide faster and more consistent broadband. The picture starts to change in a year or so when femtocell-based add-on services and applications become more prominent in the market”. Looking ahead, Infonetics believes that “by 2015, the focus shifts to leveraging the intelligence in the femtocell to offer a range of location-based, content-related, or presence-aware applications to drive higher ARPUs.”

Sound familiar? Its déjà vu all over again - using new technology to firstly gain network performance improvements and then leveraging the same technology to provide more segmented (and personalized) marketing offers and services based on powerful intelligence. This pretty much maps out the evolution of policy management. Remember when policy first appeared, the main use case was implementing fair use policies to help optimize network performance. Then came increased ‘product marketing’ use cases, such as tiered services (speed and volume), roaming, application and device service passes. Then, policy was integrated with charging to provide shared data plans, toll free content, dual persona offers and so on. Now the latest advance is using the data that mediation, policy and charging utilize to drive real-time intelligence. The news that Infonetics sees operators leveraging intelligence in femtos to offer contextual aware applications (which should deliver more value to consumers) by 2015 is to be welcomed. This means that the evolution from policy to PCC to ‘PCC plus intelligence’ is established, and using policy and charging to enable personalized offers based on network level intelligence will soon become a mainstream business process for operators.

It could be argued that the roll out of LTE and the ability to differentiate services based on speed was the catalyst for PCC being used as a marketing enabler. This was due to the increased data usage through a wide range of data led services, which led to an increase in the number of products and applications which provided more customer choice. The trend here is on-going; every week we see new service offers from operators. This leads to increased customer segmentation, and as customer expectations and competitive challenges advance, operators often have a very short time to get to market an increasing range of offers.
 
LTE is changing the speed at which operators do business. Increases in sophistication in customer behavior are radically changing how operators develop and market their services. The immediacy of customers’ data experience is resulting in the continuous marketing loop of analyzing behavior, developing offers, launching and promoting services, and back to campaign measurement at a faster rate than ever before (see figure 1). Add new services from partners in to the mix and the process becomes more complex, as well as faster. New offers and services development are becoming increasingly dynamic, as operators continue to develop their pricing and product strategies based on value, rather than be involved in a race to the bottom by selling a generic commodity. As operators look at how to best monetize these new and enhanced services, they are looking at the pricing and packaging flexibility that exists in legacy BSS systems and asking if they provide the flexibility and fast time to market that dynamic data driven services will require.

Being able to sell services based on value (rather than just price) involves knowing that some services have more value to different people based on the customer context – e.g. who, what, when, where and what. Having this business intelligence in real-time and using it to drive offers to be presented to appropriate segments in real-time, direct to the device, is providing a significant opportunity to take advantage of the data that operators already have and use it to provide personalized, relevant marketing in real-time.

It took several years for policy to evolve the way it has. It’s now at the stage where it’s supporting a wide range of business-focused use cases, integrated with charging, and is being used as part of a solution driven by real-time network intelligence. The news that operators will roll out residential femtocells and will use intelligence from femtocells to enable contextual specific apps by 2015 just goes to show how PCC has evolved to be a central tenant, not just of BSS, but also of marketing and offer development.

__________

*With 25 years’ experience in mobile communications software, Martin has worked in mobile billing software since the early days of the industry. In that time he’s spoken at over 50 telecoms conferences worldwide and had a similar number of articles published in the telecoms trade press and served on trade association and company boards. At Openet Martin is responsible for marketing thought leadership and market interaction.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Diametriq Adds Support for Pre-Paid Roaming between 3G and LTE


Diametriq announced the ".. addition of CAMEL/WIN [Customized Applications for Mobile enhanced Logic/Wireless Intelligent Network] to its Diameter Interworking System™ ensuring pre-paid subscriber roaming between LTE and 3G networks. Diametriq along with a Tier-1 operator, have taken the lead and developed the CAMEL/WIN specification solving a critical challenge of supporting subscriber services as operators transition to 4G and beyond .. The Diameter Interworking System serving as a Diameter Interworking Function (IWF) provides an interworking capability for Diameter and SS7 that may be dynamically customized using script or plug-ins".
 
Anjan Ghosal [pictured], president and CEO, Diametriq said: “A major benefit of Diametriq’s Diameter Interworking System is that it may be interfaced to any vendor’s Diameter Signaling Controller (DSC) for easy integration to other network elements. We offer a cost-effective alternative to upgrading a legacy system or purchasing a new one”.

See "Diametriq Enhances its Diameter Interworking System™ for Pre-Paid Compatibility" - here.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Qwilt: Our Customers See 50% Cache Hit, 80% QoE Improvement


Qwilt reported ".. new Worldwide Online Video Quality of Experience (QoE) data, compiled from analytic network performance insights from its global customer deployments. In its first annual report, the company measured the average bitrate of customer networks across North America [customers include Mediacom and Comway], South America, Europe and Asia, to determine actual viewer QoE during peak viewing times, from popular content providers, like Netflix and YouTube. 

.. average bitrates were measured from video streams delivered by Qwilt and those delivered by upstream content providers. The comparison of the two average bit rates shows the real QoE impact of Qwilt’s solution in operator networks. The report data conclusively shows that Qwilt’s transparent caching solution, the QB-Series Video Fabric Controller [see "Qwilt Unveils Transparent-video Delivery Solution" - here], consistently delivered more than 50-percent of the video traffic while producing greater than 80-percent improvement in video streaming QoE during peak times".




See "New Worldwide Online Video QoE Report Shows Qwilt Delivers Over 80% Improvement in Consumer Quality of Experience During Prime Time" - here.

Ulticom Deploys its DSC Technology with Technotree Charging Solution


Ulticom announced the ".. deployment of the Ulticom Diameter Signaling Controller (DSC) to optimize Diameter-based charging traffic for the Tecnotree Agility™ Convergent Charging System

The Ulticom DSC acts as a load balancer and provides intelligent distribution for Diameter-based transactions across multiple pools of servers performing Online Charging Services (OCS) .. Tecnotree product deployments use Ulticom’s Service-Oriented Routing™ technology. Service-Oriented Routing goes beyond the typical primary-backup reliability strategy commonly used with full mesh Diameter signaling. With Service-Oriented Routing, the DSC manages traffic for network assets (sets of servers that can support a service acting together as a single Logical Service) transparently. The DSC invisibly optimizes the user experience by managing load across server pools and dynamically compensating for congestion or server failure when necessary".
Technotree
Agility™ Convergent Charging

Tecnotree is a "global provider of telecom IT solutions for the management of products, customers and revenue. Tecnotree helps communications service providers to transform their business towards a marketplace of digital services. Tecnotree empowers service providers to monetise service bundles, provide personalised user experiences and augment value throughout the customer lifecycle".



See "Tecnotree Deploys Ulticom DSC to Optimize Charging Traffic" - here.

Friday, November 22, 2013

Monday's Guest Post: Towards Business-Focused Policy Management

 
A new guest post will be published on Monday - "Femtocells, LTE and the Move to Personalization – The Evolution of Policy" by my 31st guest, Martin Morgan.
 
"LTE is changing the speed at which operators do business. Increases in sophistication in customer behavior are radically changing how operators develop and market their services" says Martin.

Stay tuned!

Amdocs Wants to Bring Together PCC, DPI, Optimization and Analytics Vendors


Amdocs announced "Amdocs PCC Ecosystem partner program - This expansion of Amdocs' Enreach partner program will address service providers' lack of integration in the network control domain by bringing together policy, charging, inline monetization, deep packet inspection (DPI), optimization and analytics vendor specialists. The program's goal is to create the industry's broadest ecosystem of partners working together to develop new offerings and service provider use cases. 

Amdocs PCC Ecosystem will be part of the Amdocs Experience Center, which will create real-life demonstrations of the new solutions so service providers can see firsthand the value of PCC integration. The facility will give service providers a logical starting point for innovating and incubating new ideas".



Sample PCC Ecosystem Use Cases (see "Amdocs Policy and Charging Control Ecosystem and Data
Monetization Lab" - here):
  • Multiple application quotas: Offer flexible service tiers with application-based usage quotas
      
  • OTT video optimization: Offer optimized video service as a premium add-on to data plans – optimized for device and subscriber
     
  • Promotional vouchers: Offer one-time temporary services – Facebook for an hour, happy hour, quality of service boost
     
  • Shared data plan for SMB: Offer tailored data plans with a common data pool, and personalized entitlements
     
  • Home zone (location-based awareness): Offer free or discounted mobile data services in customer, home or other specific locations
     
  • 1-800 or toll-free data: Enter into revenue sharing partnerships with OTT vendors; share the cost of data delivery
See "Amdocs Announces New Network-Based Solutions and Partner Program" - here

Thursday, November 21, 2013

cVidya Launches a Marketing Analytics Solution for MNOs


cVidya launched a "powerful Marketing Analytics solution that will enable mobile operators to maximize revenue from existing services, improve customer acquisition and retention, and break into new markets. 

Able to analyze customer information from multiple sources, Enrich™ offers a 360° view of cross-business key performance indicators, as well as packages of pre-modeled customer data analytics designed to address specific challenges faced by mobile operators. These include accelerating the penetration of data services and maximizing data revenue, improving customer acquisition and retention, managing LTE migration, optimizing price plans, and identifying opportunities for collaboration with third parties.



See "cVidya Launches Powerful Marketing Analytics Suite" - here.

Major OEM Deal to Ulticom's DSC in China (ZTE/Huawei ?); Initial Deployment in Asia


Ulticom announced an "OEM agreement with a major Chinese Telecom Equipment Manufacturer (TEM) to supply Ulticom’s DSC product as an integral component of their Evolved Packet Core (EPC) product line".

Jamie McArdle [pictured], VP Sales, Ulticom may have given us a hint: "A leading global provider of telecom equipment and network solutions has selected the Ulticom DSC Initial deployments of our DSC are with one of the world’s top 10 largest Mobile Network Operators located in Asia”.

Earlier this year, Paula Bernier, reported to TMCnet that "Ulticom now offers a white-label version of its Diameter signaling controller product. Related collateral, such as documentation, also can be branded with the partner vendor’s name .. It’s OEM partners include Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks, and ZTE" (here)".
See "Ulticom Wins Major Diameter Signaling Controller Contract" - here.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

NI Deployments [274]: Eastlink [Canada] Selected Astellia


Astellia announced a "new contract with Canadian mobile network operator Eastlink. Astellia will implement its unified network performance management system. By integrating both RAN and Core data into customized dashboards for network planning, maintenance, and radio optimization, Astellia is able to provide 360° network visibility. This will enable Eastlink to further optimize their network and pinpoint areas for performance tuning with geographical precision and consideration of unique area topography".

Eastlink is Canada's largest family owned and operated telecommunications company with operations in eight Canadian provinces and Bermuda. It offers wireless services since 2011 and HSPA/LTE services since February 2013.

See "Canada's Eastlink to adopt Astellia's 3G and 4G monitoring solution" - here.

VSS Monitoring Adds Big Data Visibility Solution


VSS Monitoring launched the "Big Data Visibility solution ..  built on two new advances in the vMesh Architecture: vSpool™ and vNetConnect™:
    VSS' VSpool
  • The vSpool hardware module for VSS Monitoring’s vBroker™ chassis enables network data to be captured directly from the network infrastructure, and delivered to and analyzed synchronously or asynchronously by any network analytics, forensics and big data systems over a common storage or content platform.
  • vNetConnect software enables agent-free visibility into Vmware and Cisco virtual switches, providing visibility into physical and virtual workloads and the associated network traffic without requiring any additional software to be installed on the hypervisor or as a virtual machine.
Both products are available immediately. vNetConnect™ software starts at $20,000, and vSpool™ starts at $7,000". 
 




See "VSS Monitoring Delivers Network Data to Big Data Analytics Systems" - here.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

RADCOM: $3.6M Order for Customer Experience Solution by Tier1 MNO


RADCOM announced that it "received new orders amounting to 3.6 million dollars with a tier 1 operator in Asia. This is an expansion of an existing deployment with this operator. RADCOM’s Customer Experience solution enables this service provider to provide its customers with extremely high quality service on their mobile devices .. With these new orders, RADCOM will provide this customer with an expansion of dozens of gigabytes to its existing RADCOM Quality of Experience system, monitor its LTE network and enhance the service provider's marketing analytics capabilities".


See "RADCOM Wins 3.6 Million Dollar Deals from Asian LTE Provider" - here.

Ruckus Launched Wi-Fi Analytics


Ruckus Wireless announced "launch of Ruckus SmartCell™ Insight, the first carrier-class Wi-Fi analytics platform capable of archiving years of historical operational data that can be generated by up to hundreds of thousands of Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi access points and millions of client Wi-Fi sessions on mobile network operator (MNO) and large enterprise Wi-Fi networks .. Available starting in Q1 2014, the Ruckus SmartCell Insight base software platform is priced at $35,000 (USD), with additional access point licensing of $25 (USD) per AP, which lets customers pay as they grow"


Ruckus SmartCell Insight is a software-based analytics platform that collects, stores and parses a wide variety of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi components including Ruckus ZoneFlex™ access points (APs), the Ruckus SmartCell™ Gateway (SCG), and Ruckus ZoneDirector™ wireless LAN (WLAN) controllers"
.

Selina Lo [pictured], president and CEO ("Prefect Happiness? A big and unexpected P.O at the end of the quarter"), Ruckus Wireless said:

Operators want and need this level of visibility to assess if the Wi-Fi networks they are building are actually meeting the objectives of their business .. SmartCell Insight is the first carrier solution on the market to do this by delivering detailed analytics in an easy to use, customizable and highly scalable fashion”.

See "Ruckus Introduces The First Massively Scalable, Carrier-Class Wi-Fi Analytics Platform" - here.

Monday, November 18, 2013

NTT Data OEMs Procera's DPI Engine

   
Procera Networks announced that their "Network Application Visibility Library (NAVL) has been selected by NTT DATA Corporation for development of a network traffic analytics product. 

NTT DATA’s solution will provide enterprises with data forensics, network security, network monitoring, traffic analysis and Big Data processing. NTT DATA will be leveraging NAVL as the DPI engine of choice, as they look to gain visibility into how enterprise networks are being used. Procera’s ability to deliver Internet Intelligence for today’s rapidly evolving network applications landscape was the driving force behind the selection" 

Recently, Procera announced that NAVL was selected by "4 leading technology companies for inclusion in their products" (here).



See "Procera Networks Selected by NTT DATA for NAVL-based Network Visibility" - here.

Plusnet: Traffic Management/DPI is for your Own Viewing Pleasure!


Martyn Hudson explains in Plusnet's blog how the UK ISP deals with major events generating spikes in bandwidth demand for several hours "Red Bull Stratos" (8M people watching live) or two weeks during the London 2012 Olympics games [see "Sandvine and Procera Analyze the Olympics Games" - here].

The games "saw Internet usage skyrocket – no more so than from business users. As we can see from the graph below, business use, depicted by the darker line, more than doubled across several days – no doubt as workers sneakily tuned into Olympics coverage whilst at their desks throughout the working week. Traffic from business use returned to a low level from the 3rd, which was incidentally the first weekend".



"So how does Plusnet cope with all this demand? - We know that people using our broadband, whether at work or at home, want to be able to watch big events particularly if it is once in a lifetime, such as the London Olympics was. In the case of events like the Olympics we have to consider not only the normal every day demand and the extra traffic from people watching the event but also increased usage from people working from home who didn’t want to travel. In order to ensure that everyday browsing, streaming and gaming continues to work as normal and everyone gets a good experience on the event traffic and their work VPNs Plusnet uses traffic prioritisation. 

This traffic prioritisation ensures that interactive and real time traffic will take priority over less time critical traffic, like file downloads, so that where one person in a household is watching the football game they don’t see any buffering because someone else is downloading the latest software updates for their phone at the same time". 

Nevertheless, Plusnet deploys a traffic management policy is done "at busy times" - probably not only just during global event, such as the Olympics or the Royal wedding. Their support web page (here) explains it:


 
See "Internet usage around big events" - here.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Adax Partners with Agata to Offer DPI Probe


Adax Packet Processing
 board
Adax announced "..a new partnership with communications and networking specialist Agata Solutions. Agata have integrated their high-performance Packet Processing Software with the Adax Pkt2-PCIe, an intelligent Cavium-based Packet Processing Controller to produce the Agata DPI Probe product. 

The Agata DPI probe and Packet Processing software is available now integrated with the Adax Pkt2-PCIe boards and can be used as building blocks for a wide range of applications for security detection and protection for example to defend against Denial of Service attacks, traffic redirection according to the demands of specific applications, and traffic modification for example to enable ad insertion. 



See "Agata and Adax Partner in DPI Probe Solution for Network Intelligence" - here.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Gigaom Bandwidth Caps Watch (8 out of 15 ISPs on the Black List)


Stacey Higginbotham ("Over 60% of US Broadband Subscribers have Data Caps" - here)  [pictured] explains that "We’re not fans of ISPs capping broadband here at Gigaom, so we’re keeping a close eye on how those caps evolve and who they affect. Check out our updated list on who’s capping your broadband .. In most cases, the companies implementing caps maintain that 99 or 98 percent of their users don’t go over them and have median usages that range between 12 and 18 GB per month. So here are the top broadband providers in the U.S. and their caps. Last year we included a column for exceptions to the cap, but this year there aren’t any, so we took that column out". 

ISPs with no caps: TWC, Verizon, Cablevision, Frontier, Windstream, Fairpoint and Cincinnati Bell. 4 ISPs have overage costs - Comcast (see "Comcast Response to Recent Claims: Higher Base Cap w/Tiered Plans or Overage Fees" - here), AT&T, Suddenlink and MediaCom.

See the full table - "Want to know if your ISP is capping data? Check our updated chart" - here.

Ericsson: "The largest and fastest growing mobile data traffic segment is video"


Ericsson latest Mobility Report reveals ".. that mobile subscriptions are expected to reach 9.3 billion by 2019, and more than 60 percent of these - 5.6 billion - will be for smartphones. To support the smartphone user experience, WCDMA/HSPA networks are predicted to cover 90 percent of the world's population by 2019. Moreover, almost two-thirds (65 percent) of the world's population will be covered by 4G/LTE networks".


"The largest and fastest growing mobile data traffic segment is video. It is expected to increase by around 55 percent annually up until the end of 2019, by which point it is forecasted to account for more than 50 percent of global mobile traffic".

 




See "Ericsson Mobility Report: Global smartphone subscriptions to reach 5.6 billion by 2019" - here.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Australian Police Seeks DPI Appliances @10Gbps


The Australian Federal Police (AFP) ".. intends to expand upon its network forensics expertise to include new deep packet inspection capacity that will be able to capture and retain metadata. The agency is currently seeking tenders for an appliance that can accept a stream of TCP/IP traffic or potentially previously captured packets in PCAP format. The request for tender does not specify where the input to the appliance will come from, but states that at a minimum, it must be able to analyse flows of information at 10Gbps, regardless of whether it is using IPv4 or IPv6. Further requirements that the AFP needs are the ability to identify services and applications at the application layer.

Proposals are additionally expected to be able to filter out packets based on keywords, protocols, applications, IP addresses and ports. They should also identify malware, antivirus activity, communication and mobile applications, detect various types of encryption when used and de-capsulate tunnelling protocols. An example of the latter could include the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol commonly used in virtual private network (VPN) connections, assuming the AFP is able to bypass the secure channel typically established to protect such data.

See "AFP seeks deep packet inspection capability to capture metadata" - here.

Vodafone Shows Shared Data Plans Benefits (to Vodafone)


Paolo Bertoluzzo [pictured], Vodafone's Group Chief Commercial and Operations Officer, highlighted "Vodafone differentiation" during Vodafone's 2013 H1 presentation (here).

The first differentiation factor seems to be Vodafone's RED - its "worry free" mobile plan [see "Vodafone to Offer Multi-Device and Family Plans (End of 2013)" -here] that includes shared family and device billing. The following slides show the benefits to Vodafone:






Thursday, November 14, 2013

Avvasi Enhances Analytics with RAN-Aware QoE Visualization


Avvasi announced the ".. release of Xperium Maps, a radio network QoE visualization tool .. Xperium Maps offers unprecedented capabilities, allowing mobile network providers to visualize in real-time and historically the evolution of video QoE at the Radio Access Network (RAN) level. 

Mobile service providers, when confronted with the growth of mobile video in their networks, are often at a loss to pinpoint the impact of the traffic on their subscriber’s Quality of Experience, especially in video. The feature allows them to detect video quality loss at a very granular level and to plan for capacity expansion or traffic management efficiently. This feature allows network operators to identify where media is consumed in their networks and whether video quality issues tend to appear in isolated areas or in QoE hotspots"

See also "Avvasi Launches Video Analytics Service Gateway - w/Location (RAN), Device and Subscriber Awareness" - here.



See "Avvasi launches leading-edge RAN-aware quality visualization" - here.

Winners of BBTM Awards 2013: Oracle, Avvasi, ALU, Procera, Huawei, Skyfire and Flash Networks



The Broadband Traffic Congress 2013 awards, shown with relevant links to recent posts in my blog (see 2012 awards here):

Optimization Deployments [273]: KT [Korea] the First MNO to Use Ericsson Acceleration


Ericsson announced that "KT has entered into an agreement with Ericsson to launch a mobile content acceleration [MCA] service in its live LTE network. This will be the world's first commercial deployment of its kind, and it builds on technology provided by Ericsson.

According to Ericsson's MCA product page - "The Ericsson Mobile Cloud Accelerator comes pre-integrated with the global Content Delivery Network of Akamai Technologies..  When operators sign a separate agreement with Akamai for Over-The-Top monetization, this enables an initial critical mass of content providers whose business is impacted by the performance of the mobile access network"

At the end of Q3, 2013 KT had more than 6.8M LTE subscribers, impressive portion (42%) of thier total customer base.

source: KT


source: KT
"KT completed a technical feasibility study in January this year after testing and verifying the performance and interoperability of Ericsson's solution in a live network. This was followed by a commercial feasibility study in the third quarter, and the positive results led to KT's decision to launch a commercial service by Q1, 2014

The trial results showed that using MCA reduces web page download time by more than 50 percent, dramatically improving the user experience. This is achieved by guaranteeing traffic transmission quality of certain categories of data, such as premium content and application traffic in the radio access area. The idea is to avoid the effects of radio congestion. The prioritization mechanism can be likened to having large vehicles running on a bus-only lane during periods of heavy traffic, while ordinary cars run on other lanes at slower speeds".

See "KT speeds up mobile content using Ericsson technology" - here.

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Netflix CDN Customers have More Fun

   
Showing Prime Time data. Source: Netflix
Netflix (31.6% of US fixed traffic - here) has improved its "ISP Performance" reports [see "Netflix - New Site Shows ISP Performance for US, UK, Scandinavia and more" - here], by isolating the prime time statistics - "so you know which Internet service providers (ISPs) deliver the best Netflix experience when it matters most".

Joris Evers, director of corporate communications at Netflix, shows in a blog post the effect of the Netflix' CDN on ISP performance, during prime time:

"Prime time is the equivalent of rush hour on the Internet. This can lead to congestion on the network, just like physical traffic can on roads. When watching Netflix, network congestion can manifest itself as buffering, lower video quality or longer start-up times. 

This graphic shows how important the effect of network congestion during prime time can be on the viewing experience. ISP speeds are consistently much better for customers served by ISPs that directly connect their network to Netflix using our Open Connect content delivery network.
[see "Majority of Netflix Traffic Uses its Free CDN" - here and "Netflix CDN Appliance Design: 100TB;10Gbps -- in 4U Chassis" - here]. This performance difference is even more evident during prime time".

Apparently, Cablevision is using the CDN and TWC doesn’t, and indeed its prime time service shows significant worse performance, while Cablevision maintains a more constant service. Nevertheless, TWC is still better than other ISPs, according to the above chart.



See "New: Netflix Prime Time ISP Performance Metrics'" - here.

Infonetics: Embedded DPI Gets Traction


Infonetics Research provided some additional information from its recent DPI report (see previous post - here). 

Shira Levine, directing analyst for service enablement and subscriber intelligence, forecasts that "spending on standalone DPI solutions to grow 30% year-over-year in 2013, driven largely by the mobile segment.

The concept of “DPI inside” is gaining traction as manufacturers embed DPI into larger solutions such as video optimization, content charging, and service assurance. 

Building on the momentum it gained at the end of last year, Sandvine passed Allot to take the lead in the DPI market in the first half of 2013 (1H13)"

As for the current market share among the 3 public DPI pure-players during the first 3 quarters of 2013 - see here and the chart below.

 


See "Mobile device usage driving investment in deep packet inspection (DPI); Sandvine reclaims #1 spot" - here.