Vendor Review: Bytemobile New Smart Capacity System

   

Bytemobile is going to announce today a significant upgrade to its Unison system, its "Next Generation of Media Optimization, designed to Manage Video Traffic for Millions of 3G and 4G Subscribers".

Last week I discussed the new product with Ronny Haraldsvik who was recently appointed as Byte's Vice President, Global Marketing.

On the business side, Mr. Haraldsvik says that 2010 was Byte's best year ever, booking wise, and the company forecasts even a better 2011 and plans to increase headcount by 15% during the year. Europe leads the growth, and Asia is also growing nicely. The IBM partnership (see below) will be expanded beyond the use of the BladeCenter, into joint selling.

The new Unison s/w "Smart Capacity at the Core" main challenge is to manage the most important content on today's mobile internet traffic - streaming video (see "Bytemobile Forecasts Video to be more than 60% of Total Mobile Traffic in 2011" - here).

Byte added a number of new technologies, which help manage congestion by reducing traffic volumes, while improving the user's QoE. 

These include streaming policy control for all major audio and video services - including maintaining rights for Digital Rights Management (DRM) content – for increased network efficiency and enhanced delivery of multimedia and High-Definition (HD) optimization. The latter removes inefficiencies in the original video first and then applies content-aware quality reduction.

In addition, Byte improved its caching solution (see "Video Caching - Bytemobile Joins the Party" - here), to support all video sites and ability to optimize cached video in the background with higher compression. 

All in all, the company says (based on averages from 2 American and 2 EMEA operators) that Unison 6 reduces traffic by 38% (see chart) compared to 29% with version 5.0. This translates into 50% increase of network capacity.

Byte new solution is offered as an integrated device (see chart), based on IBM's BladeCenter, that concentrate all functions into a single cassis, handling 10 Gbps and 1.5M active subscribers.