Alfa (Lebanon) Uses Openwave for Traffic Shaping

 

Openwave (NASDAQ:OPWV) reported quarterly results yesterday (here). Revenues were disappointing at $40.1M, compares to $49.7M in previous quarter and $44.7 on the same quarter last year. Shares dropped by 13.6% on Thursday, with nearly 8 times the average trading volume.

During the conference call (transcript  here) Openwave's CEO, Ken Denman, mentioned that "In the quarter we also signed a deal with Lebanese mobile operator, Alfa, which is upgraded to Integra to help them address bandwidth challenges head on by shaping their data traffic. With Integra installed Alfa can eventually monetize their mobile traffic ahead of the competition." .

Alfa (owned by the Orascom Telecom since February 2009) has over 1M subscribers. The site shows only GPRS/WAP technologies as available for their Mobile Internet service (here)

Openwave, that was focusing on mobile messaging has shifted in the recent quarters to a more comprehensive mobile data gateway solution. As mobile operators are seeking multi-function elements, mobile equipment vendors have to integrate more and more functions into their offering, as there will be no room for single-function standalone boxes. We can see this direction taken by many vendors, line Comverse (see "DPI – Recent Product Announcements, New Player" - here), Bytemobile and Flash Networks moving from optimization solutions to service gateways,  the merger between Mobixell and 724 Solutions (here).

DPI and traffic shaping is certainly one of these required integrated functions. For Openwave, this is somehow accomplished by the Media Optimizer, which includes a "Dynamic Bandwidth Shaping: Adjust the optimized media bit-rate delivered to the subscriber based on available network bandwidth".

While it does detect video traffic, the web site does not mention the detection of other important protocols (such as P2P file sharing) - so it seems that the DPI functionality is pretty basic. Openwave launched the Media Optimizer on February (press release - here), focusing on video traffic management.