Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Sprint Migrates from a "Basket of Tools" to Consolidated Video Optimization Solutions

 
The recent trends in traffic management are integrating multiple traffic management and optimization tools into a single solution, and moving away from simple throttling policy to more sophisticated congestion management, OTT control and quality of experience management - considering both network cost reduction and revenues generation.
 
Vendors that used to offer single functions (DPI, optimization) are enhancing their solution with additional functions - either by self-development (F5 and Bytemobile adding DPI), acquisitions (rumors of Allot buying Ortiva - here), OEM or partnerships.

All this is done to stay ahead of some of these capabilities that are offered by existing network elements - such as Cisco's GGSN in-line services or DPI functionality in Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent or Nokia-Siemens Networks GGSNs.

A recent story by Sarah Reedy (pictured) to Light Reading shows how well this approach is accepted by Sprint.

Bob Azzi, SVP of Networks, said "When we deliver video, we we're wasting bandwidth .. the core is aware of the type of device and the content the user is demanding and only sends the bandwidth necessary for both, reducing what's required at the RF layer".

VP of Development and Engineering Iyad Tarazi (pictured) said "We used to see in the past, four to five years ago, one supplier doing caching, one doing encoding and decoding, others looking at pinching and throttling .. We're now seeing consolidation and optimization tools that are customer-friendly .. The tools still have to do all the things -- caching, encoding, decoding, etc. -- but now the tools focus on managing the network, rather than looking at the quality of the video that the content supplier is capable of delivering. That doesn't mean throttling .. it could mean sending video to a consumer that is optimized for the network speed in a specific area, instead of sending the consumer the best possible version of that video available from the content provider". 
See "Sprint's Optimized Mobile Video Strategy" - here.

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