Monday, March 7, 2011

New Standard Suggests "Local Caching" to Reduce Mobile Network Congestion

   
A new IEEE standard, HQME (High Quality Mobile Experience) is proposed by a "newly formed group of mobile and content industry leaders that includes SanDisk Corporation, SoftBank Mobile, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Orange" takes a new approach for caching - pre-download content when you can (and when it is cheap) - not when you need. As long as you know what to download, I guess.

The standard "leverages local storage and intelligent content caching to relieve network congestion and accelerate data delivery to the mobile device .. Under the proposed IEEE P2200 standard, memory on the mobile device is viewed as the ‘last node on the network.’ This calls for compliant applications to download content when the mobile device is connected to AC power and Wi-Fi instead of during peak hours the next day. Preemptively downloading content to the device’s local storage allows consumers to access the content they want while circumventing the bottlenecks associated with mobile network congestion during peak hours"

See "New IEEE P2200 Draft Standard Aims to Deliver High Quality Mobile Experience (HQME) to Consumers Worldwide" - here and more technical details - here and  here.

2 comments:

  1. Don't see anything useful of this standard/approach as it tends to change subscriber's behavior without operators' incentives. For example, if I have time to pre-download in non-busy hours, why don't I watch it directly.

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  2. To previous comment: take a look at the current YouTube interface - already now the most influential video website has a "watch later" button - which means they concluded that watching immediately might be the most common scenario, but not the only one.
    From the user perspective you can add the fact that streaming costs massive data charges (not every one has an unlimited company phone). This can lead users to want caching via Wifi over night of what they asked to watch later or for series of contents. When doing that the user will also enjoy heavier file encoded for HD - a better experience than immediate mobile streaming usually is.

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