ipoque Launches an Application/Subscriber Classification Probe

R&S®Net Sensor

ipoque, a Rohde & Schwarz company (acquired on May 2011 - here), launched "R&S®Net Sensor - a technically advanced IP application classification probe. R&S®Net Sensor allows mobile and fixed network operators and service providers to extract meaningful network traffic information and subscriber behavior data as well as identify statistical trends, either in real-time or aggregated up to one year.
 

.. R&S®Net Sensor also features a special internal interface to R&S®PACE which ensures that all updates to detection and metadata extraction performed on the R&S®PACE software are reflected in the R&S®Net Sensor’s output in real-time. Automatic remote updates to the IP classification library ensure that the probe capabilities stay current with minimal effort. This guarantees operators very fast time to market for detection and classification of formerly unknown new applications and protocols. It is available at various line speeds from 1 Gbps to 40 Gbps to cater to the requirements of small networks through to the demands of large
operators.

With this product release, ipoque becomes integrated into the Rohde & Schwarz brand. ipoque has been a subsidiary of the Munich based electronics group with a global sales and service network since 2013". 

See "ipoque launched R&S®Net Sensor, its first product under the Rohde & Schwarz brand" - here.

Amdocs Integrates RAN Management and Optimization Solutions

Amdocs announced an ".. integrated solution to optimize multi-vendor, multi-technology, heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The Amdocs Centralized Management and Optimization solution is the only radio access network (RAN) optimization solution that embeds multi-vendor network intelligence to enable mobile network operators to deliver optimal coverage and capacity in complex, multi-vendor networks across 2G, 3G, and LTE/ 4G and deliver a seamless quality of experience (QoE) for customers.

The Amdocs Centralized Management and Optimization solution includes: 

• Amdocs Customer Experience Geo-Location [see "Amdocs Acquires Actix ($120M) to Provide Geo-located Network Information" - here] - reduces customer experience issues by up to 75 percent by automatically building traffic and quality of experience maps that enable the identification of congestion hotspots, quality issues and network problems, linking to customer data to allow service providers to focus activities where they will drive greater profitability
   
• Amdocs SON  [see "Amdocs Positions Actix/Celcite as its SON Solution" - here] - reduces dropped calls by up to 20 percent by simplifying network management and maximizing network potential through automated optimization, enabling service providers to deliver effective customer experience improvements by targeting optimization based on customer revenue and business value.
   
• Amdocs Automatic Intelligent Correlation (AIC) - a RAN management solution that reduces time to diagnose network problems by up to 86 percent through automatic detection problems, proposing short-term operational and maintenance fixes along with long-term optimization solutions.
   
• Amdocs Benchmarking - provides automated benchmark diagnostics to enable an up to 80 percent2 reduction in processing time to plan network improvements, correlate benchmark results with subscriber experience and improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
   
• Amdocs Network Acceptance implements automated, independent verification of network quality and detailed problem investigation prior to network launch, enforcing transparent and unambiguous KPIs, ensuring launch quality in LTE and small cell rollouts, reducing network acceptance time by up to 80 percent.

See "Amdocs Introduces Industry’s First Centralized, Intelligent, Multi-Vendor Network Optimization Solution" - here.

Vasona Networks Fights Packet Loss

Vasona Networks is expanding its solution beyond congestion management (here), tackling general QoE issues resulting from packet lost (Vasona "estimates that when a typical high-quality video is streamed, packets are dropped every 5-10 seconds").

The company annouced that it "expands its efforts to help mobile operators deliver the best customer experiences in the face of challenging network conditions. Version 2.1 of the company’s flagship Vasona SmartAIR™ builds on industry-first dynamic rate control with feedback (DRCF), adding Mobile Packet Assurance. 

This new feature enhances application performance when data packets are lost in the network not only as a result of bandwidth congestion, but also from weak signal strength or other performance-impacting events. Mobile Packet Assurance leverages Vasona Networks’ ability to take real-time action based on intelligence about all traffic in individual cells at any moment .. Version 2.1 of SmartAIR will be released mid-summer"

See "Vasona Networks Takes Mobile Experience Improvement Beyond Network Congestion Management" - here.

Oracle Adds Virtual PCRF

Oracle announced the "release of four products that underscore its commitment to provide communications service providers (CSPs) with a fully virtualized, network function virtualization (NFV)-ready solution portfolio.

.. With new releases of Oracle Communications Session Border Controller, Oracle Communications Converged Application Server, Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper, and Oracle Communications Policy Management, Oracle helps CSPs conquer the layers of complexity inherent in bridging physical and virtual environments as they continue on their journey toward NFV.

.. Oracle Communications Policy Management Supports Network Advancement Through VoLTE, IMS, and Virtualization".

See similar announcements from Openet, Amdocs.

".. The newest version of Oracle Communications Policy Management is a key component in the deployment of next-generation LTE networks. As network virtualization continues to advance, CSPs require the flexibility, reliability, and depth of feature functionality that enables them to evolve their networks through LTE, Voice over LTE (VoLTE), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and virtualization. Oracle Communications Policy Management now takes the next step toward a fully cloud-enabled and virtualized policy management solution, preparing CSPs for NFV and software defined network (SDN)-enabled networks. The solution also:

• Enables tight integration with charging and billing systems
• Provides valuable network insights via an integrated policy analytics solution
• Allows providers to serve all subscribers from a single policy management instance regardless of network access type

See "Oracle Communications Virtualizes Its Products to Support Network Function Virtualization Industry Initiative" - here

ACS Uses Saguna to Bring MEC to Enterprise's Small Cells

  

Saguna Networks announced that the ".. Saguna Open-RAN platform has been selected by ACS, a part of the $1.5Bn+ Pivot Group .. ACS's new Smart Perimeter Enterprise solution leverages Saguna’s Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) software solution to provide locally provisioned value-added voice, data and video services to small-cell-enabled enterprises.

..ACS’s Smart Perimeter Enterprise Solution™ locally provisioned voice, data and video services reduce Enterprise operating cost and can augment, and even replace, traditional tethered and unlicensed solutions. The MEC-based solution offers new revenue streams to the mobile operator, while saving the client money. It leverages the investment in an IP mobile network and licensed spectrum while improving coverage, reducing the cost of small cell deployment, and providing the analytic data required to ensure a consistently high quality of experience (QoE).

Bob Pike [pictured], CTO at ACS commented “ACS is excited to bring the promise of MEC to the enterprise market and deliver new services from the mobile network radio edge. With the Saguna Open-RAN software, creating a complete MEC solution was fast and simple. We have been able to bring to market a fully integrated and secure, managed MEC platform running multiple value-added services with more to come.”

See "Saguna Open-RAN Mobile Edge Computing Platform Powers ACS New Smart Perimeter Enterprise Solution" - here.

TM/Security Deployments [358]: VMedia [Canada] Uses Sandvine

    

Sandvine announced that "VMedia Inc. is using Sandvine’s Traffic Management and Network Security products to ensure a high quality of experience for their subscribers.

VMedia, a Sandvine customer since March 2015, provides innovative TV, high-speed internet and home phone services to subscribers in Ontario, Canada. VMedia is well known in its market for a unique IPTV platform that delivers a whole home entertainment experience, enabling subscribers to seamlessly enjoy conventional TV, over the top content, video on demand, and many other apps on their television via a single set top box.

• VMedia chose to deploy Sandvine’s Traffic Management to ensure that during times of network congestion, subscribers will have the best possible experience when streaming VMedia’s IPTV service, or over-the-top (OTT) video services such as Netflix or CraveTV
   
• In addition to deploying Sandvine’s Traffic Management, VMedia has also deployed Sandvine’s Network Security in order to detect and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which could negatively impact the streaming experience of their subscribers. DDoS attacks attempt to make a computer resource or network unavailable, and the network infrastructure of communications service providers (CSPs) such as VMedia serve as a popular target for such malicious attacks". 

See "Sandvine Keeps VMedia’s Subscribers And Their Streams Safe" - here.

Qwilt Raised $25M; Has 50 Customers

Inbal Orpaz reports to TheMarker that "Qwilt raised additional $25M in its 4th round, bringing the total investments to date in the caching company to $67M [see Aug '13 "Qwilt has 40 Customers and 10 Trials; Raised $16M" - here] ... Qwilt has 100 employees and plans now to add 30 to its Israeli R&D center". 

Estimates are that the company valuation is $200M, the revenues in 2014 were several tens of $millions, expected to be doubled this year. The company said that in 2014 its revenues grew by 400%.  

Qwilt has 50 customers [see CallPlus, ViewQwest. kbro. Toyama. Mediacom], including the largest ISPs, and installed 80 new devices during 2014"

Redknee Acquires Orga for €38M; Gets 45 Customers, 500 Employees

Yet another acquisition in the OSS/BSS market - and it's Redknee again acquiring a German competitor (previous one - Dec. '12   "OSS/BSS Consolidation: Redknee to Buy NSN BSS" - here).

Redknee announced it has ".. reached a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Orga Systems for a total cash consideration of €38M. Orga’s technology and expertise will enhance Redknee’s real-time monetization and subscriber management platform for communication service providers and the Internet of Things (IoT). Orga Systems provides monetization solutions to more than 45 customers in the communications [see - here, Life:)], automotive, energy, and railway industries. 

Orga’s highly skilled team of more than 500 employees across Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), the Americas, and Asia Pacific will join Redknee, further broadening its global reach. Orga Systems’ 2014 revenue was approximately €60M, with recurring revenue of greater than 45%. The acquisition will be funded through available cash on hand.

Lucas Skoczkowski [pictured], CEO, Redknee said: “As we move forward with the integration, we will leverage our combined product portfolio to expand and enhance our best-of-suite customer focused solutions. We will continue to focus on delivering innovative software solutions. We expect that this acquisition will be accretive and will advance Redknee’s strategy of being the largest independent provider of choice for real-time monetization and subscriber management software. Moreover, we expect that this will help us accelerate Redknee’s expansion into new vertical markets. I look forward to updating the market on the acquisition over the coming months."

See "Redknee to Acquire Orga Systems" - here.

Ipanema Adds a Virtual, 1Gbps, Traffic Management Engine

Ipanema Technologies (part of InfoVista) announced the "..release of its new virtual engines portfolio, the vip|e. The solution embeds the whole set of features of Ipanema’s leading application performance physical devices offering (also known as ip|engines) – including application visibility and control (AVC), WAN optimization, dynamic WAN selection and network rightsizing – on a single, centrally-controllable virtual machine.

.. Ipanema’s virtual engine can be easily deployed in countries with custom-clearance issues, and in sites with limited space or constrained environments. vip|e also supports communications service providers’ (CSPs) Point of Presence-based deployments and provides them with a strong step towards network function virtualization (NFV) and SDN. Lastly, vip|e can be deployed in Cloud-Exchange Hub and Internet peering point to improve access to cloud-based applications.

Ipanema Application visibility 

The new virtual engine portfolio is available in four versions to match varying enterprise requirements from a maximum bandwidth of 20 Mbps up to 1 Gbps". 

See "Ipanema Launches Virtual Engine" - here.

Sprint's Congestion Management "relies on the radio scheduling software provided by Sprint’s hardware vendors"

Back in April '14, Sprint said that "To more fairly allocate network resources in times of congestion, customers falling within the top 5% of data users may be prioritized below other customers" (see "Sprint's Reasonable Network Management Practices - Fairness, Limit top 5%, Video Optimization" - here). 

It turns out that now, with the FCC' New Net Neutrality rules becoming effective, this is no longer necessary! (or fines like AT&T $100M [here] may cause more damage) - and now the Sprint congestion management "relies on Sprint’s hardware vendors".  

Lance Whitney reports to CNET that "Sprint has stopped its data-throttling policy now that new Net neutrality rules are in place, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

.. Sprint acknowledged the halt to its data throttling in a statement sent to CNET:

'For less than a year, Sprint used a network management practice that applied only at the level of individual congested cell sites, and only for as long as congestion existed. At such sites, we temporarily allocated resources away from the top 5 percent of heaviest users and to the 95 percent of users with normal usage, to try to allocate the effects of congestion more fairly. Once congestion at the site passed, the limitation automatically ended. Upon review, and to ensure that our practices are consistent with the FCC's net neutrality rules, we determined that the network management technique was not needed to ensure a quality experience for the majority of customers'".

Sprint's updated "Open Internet Information" page (here) says: "Sprint employs a holistic approach to managing congestion on its data network. Sprint’s first goal is to avoid congestion altogether by directing traffic to the best available spectrum resources and cell sites. Sprint also attempts to avoid congestion by managing tonnage on its network. Finally, when congestion does occur, meaning that the demand on a particular sector temporarily exceeds the ability of that sector to meet the demand, Sprint relies on the radio scheduling software provided by Sprint’s hardware vendors to allocate resources to user" 

See "Sprint stops data throttling in wake of new Net neutrality rules" - here.

[Survey]: OTT Partnerships Drive SDP Deployments; Oracle, Ericsson, Huawei Lead

A new survey of "21 convergent, mobile and cable operators" by Shira Levine, research director for service enablement and subscriber intelligence, IHS (Infonetics Research) finds that "nearly half of respondents identified supporting partnerships with over-the-top (OTT) providers and better monetization of subscriber data as very important drivers behind their service delivery platform (SDP) deployments .. Operators continue to deploy long-standing use cases such as messaging and single sign-on via their SDPs, but they are increasingly looking to expand the capabilities the SDP to support new use cases including partnerships with OTT providers and better monetization of subscriber data” 

• The majority of respondents have deployed their SDPs on-premises with commercially-available hardware, though virtualized deployments on shared hardware and via an internal cloud are most likely to be under evaluation
   
• Consequently, support for deployment on commercially-available hardware came in relatively high on the list of key criteria for SDP suppliers, although product reliability and support capabilities topped the list
   
• Oracle is the SDP supplier cited as a leader by a majority of survey participants, with Ericsson and Huawei following closely behind [links are for product pages]

See "OTT Partnerships, Subscriber Data Monetization Top Reasons Operators Deploy Service Delivery Platforms" - here.

EE to Pilot Mobile Edge Computing; Needs Multi-Vendor Support

Michelle Donegan reports to LightReading that "UK operator EE plans to run a number of pilots this summer to demonstrate potential use cases for mobile edge computing (MEC), in a move that shows industry momentum continues to build for the radio access network concept".

Mansoor Hanif [pictured], Director of Radio Access Networks, EE said . "I'm really passionate about MEC … because you're putting the computing power and added value right where the customer needs it most,"

"EE always liked [Nokia Networks'] Liquid Applications, according to Hanif. But the big question was "will it work across our whole network?" Since EE has deployed RAN equipment from Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. as well as Nokia, Hanif explained that the operator couldn't roll out network enhancements to only part of its customer base".

Related posts:

• Mobile Edge Computing Group Formed - here.
• StarHub Trialed Nokia's Liquid Applications at WTA Finals - here
• Nokia Adds BroadPeak's CDN to its Base Station Applications  - here
• Saguna's Optimization and Monetization Technology to be Deployed in 2014 - here

See "EE Revs Mobile Edge Computing Efforts" - here.

Corsa Adds QoS and Metering to its SDN Solution

Corsa Technology announced ".. new SDN metering and QoS (Quality of Service) capability for its line of performance SDN hardware. Corsa’s SDN implementation of this classic traffic engineering function allows network architects to better manage bandwidth across their network with dynamic, policy-aware metering and QoS. Framed around OpenFlow 1.3 QoS, Corsa performance SDN hardware lets network orchestration dynamically use meters and multiple classes of service to deliver SDN QoS which adjusts and adapts allocation of bandwidth at ultra-granular flow-level.

.. Policy-aware provisioning can be dynamically pushed down to the flexible Corsa SDN hardware to make on-going adjustments to meters and queue assignments. The network can then make immediate, informed queuing and discard decisions under congestion. Real-time performance monitoring automatically returns meter statistics and is checked against policy such as SLAs. For network operators including service providers and ISPs, SDN metering and queuing allows new self-serve features to be offered such as “bandwidth reservation” where users can dynamically schedule and reserve bandwidth via separate class of service and meters. 

Corsa  DP6400

From inception, Corsa has been working on dramatically improving the SDN network architecture by delivering SDN hardware that can easily and quickly scale for very large network applications. Performant and flexible, the DP6400™ product line can be configured to take on any networking function, ranging from Layer 2/3 switching and routing at massive scale, to complex Layer4- 7 aware network elements that allow network orchestration to dynamically adjust data forwarding"
  
See "Corsa Technology Announces SDN Metering and QoS" - here.

ISP Sends Bandwidth Hogs to Seek a New Provider

  

Juha Saarinen reports to itnews (Australia) that "Internet service provider Exetel has given 400 of its broadband customers notice that their contracts will be terminated for heavy usage. 

Exetel chief marketing officer Ben Colman [pictured] confirmed the contract terminations to iTnews after affected users took to the Whirlpool user forum in anger .. many also claimed to have been terminated despite never reaching their full allocated data cap.

Colman said the company had decided to terminate the plans of 400 heavy out-of-contract users after one of its regular reviews of customer usage, network performance and cost.

Exetel has advised the affected customers to "churn/transfer your ADSL/Phone service to another carrier" within 30 days.

See "Exetel dumps 400 heavy broadband users" - here.

AT&T CEO: It is Hard to Explain the SDN Concept; 10X Traffic Growth to 2020

Earlier this month I covered the intention of AT&T to use SDN ("AT&T Will Manage Data Demand w/Software-centric Approach" - here) - and it turns out it is the "most exciting thing happening now" for AT&T's CEO,  Randall Stephenson [pictured].

And it is all about Streaming Video, And Apple, And Netflix.

In an interview by Jonathan Vanian, to Fortune, Mr. Randel says:

• "You’re going to find this horribly boring, but it’s this concept called software-defined networking. You’re managing a massive global network the way you’d manage a cloud-based data center. It’s a little geekish, and only the white-socks guys and knuckle-draggers in the industry appreciate it, but it’s actually going to change how businesses operate. It’s hard to help the general businessman understand this concept.
   
• I’ll give you an example. This year’s Masters Golf Tournament came at an interesting moment in time. Over that weekend Apple released an iOS update to all of its users, the Masters was streaming over the Internet, and there was the debut of Game of Thrones. All of this was coming across the same peering point [where Internet networks connect] in our various networks, and the end customer had a miserable experience. In a software-defined network, we could have redistributed and managed that capacity in real time
   
• If you look at our core network, since 2007 the volume that we’re hauling by virtue of smartphones and video is up 100,000%. And we’re looking out to 2020, and engineering and designing to accommodate another 10X growth in volume across the network. You’re seeing this kind of mismatch playing out that has tormented us. Capacity and performance are scaling according to Moore’s law, but networks around the globe are not
   
• Without software-defined networking I don’t think the industry keeps up with these kinds of volumes. Without software-defined networking Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is going to continue to scream about how slow peering points are. You have to have this technology to accommodate video traversing these kinds of networks"

See "AT&T CEO: 'Half of our mobile network traffic is video'"- here.

Singtel Uses Viptela for SD-WAN Services

Singtel announced a "..partnership with Viptela Inc. to launch SingTel ConnectPlus Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) service. This cloud-based solution helps enterprises in Asia Pacific, Australia, Europe and the US simplify the management of their networks. .. 

The Singtel ConnectPlus SD-WAN solution enables enterprises to simplify and centralise their network provisioning and policy management, and configure network requirements in real time". 

Mr Lee Han Kheng, VP Global Products, Singtel Group Enterprise said: “Singtel is empowering enterprises with the capability to adapt and programme their network operations based on their needs. Using a self-service portal, they can exercise dynamic control over network issues such as performance, bandwidth utilisation and security.” 

Viptela Solution 

See "Singtel launches software-defined service to simplify enterprise network management" - here.

Comverse Acquires Acision for $210M

After selling a major portion of its activity, Comverse is now buying.

The company announced that it has "entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Acision, a privately-held leader in secure mobile messaging and engagement services, based in Reading, United Kingdom. Comverse will acquire Acision for a purchase price consisting of approximately $135 million in cash, 3.13 million shares of Comverse’s common stock [$75M], and potential earnout payments of up to $35 million .. the new company will be led by a team comprised of executives from both organizations under the leadership of Comverse CEO Philippe Tartavull and the company will remain headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts, USA.

In addition to offering market-leading Cloud Multi-VAS and IP messaging solutions, the combined company will provide Service Providers, Over the Top (OTT), and Enterprise customers with a wide array of fast-growing mobile monetization, enterprise messaging and digital services in high growth segments .. The combined company’s expanded portfolio will extend into new digital application areas including data analytics, secure enterprise application-toperson (A2P) messaging, credit orchestration, two-factor authentication, and Machineto-Machine (M2M) communication as well as Rich Communication Services (RCS), WebRTC, and APIs for rapid service creation.

See "Comverse Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Acision; Combined Company to Extend Global Leadership in Next-Generation Digital Service Solutions" - here.

ZTE to Use Radisys' Virtual MediaEngine to Accelerate HD Media Service Deployment

Radisys announced a "strategic partnership that will standardize Radisys’ MediaEngine™ virtualized Media Resource Function (vMRF) as the media processing solution for ZTE’s Value-added Services (VAS) and core network offerings in VoLTE, VoWiFi, video and IMS. By leveraging Radisys’ common media processing platform for all of its cloud-based offerings, ZTE is helping its customers accelerate the deployment of new interactive HD audio and HD video services, while reducing upfront capital expenditures and ongoing operating expenses".

Yang Wei, chief architect of core network deployment, ZTE Corporation said: “To enable our mobile operator customers’ transition to an NFV environment, ZTE is migrating its IMS solutions and VoLTE core network service offerings to a cloud architecture, driving an important requirement for virtualized media processing. Radisys’ vMRF delivers HD audio and HD video media processing and transcoding that are required by today’s increasingly multimedia-intensive applications.”

See "ZTE Selects Radisys’ Virtualized Media Resource Function to Power its VoLTE, VoWiFi, and Value-added Services" - here.

[Analysys Mason]: $2.3B Analytics Market in '14; SAS, IBM and Oracle Lead

A new report by Justin van der Lande, Principal Analyst, and Atul Arora, Analyst, Analysys Mason finds that "The analytics systems market generated USD2.3 billion in revenue worldwide during 2014"

Previous report (Sep. '14)showed revenues of $2.1B revenues for 2013, with expected CAGR of 12.9% (here).

Back to the current report:

• Vendors of general-purpose analytics tools have increased their efforts to provide solutions for communications service providers (CSPs)
   
• Every major telecoms OSS/BSS vendor has developed a big data analytics strategy, mostly based on Hadoop technologies
   



SAS Visual Analytics

• North American CSPs continued to account for the largest proportion of telecoms spending on analytics systems.

• SAS Institute provides customer insight solutions for marketing departments within CSPs and is building on this core competency to expand installations to support new use cases
   
• IBM is closing on SAS’s position as market leader. Its acquisition of The Now Factory has given it additional capabilities specifically for CSPs. IBM is fuelling growth by addressing non-telco-specific requirements.
   
• Oracle’s core analytics capabilities continue to provide key functionality within CSPs. Its products support streaming data, data storage and a bundle of pre-defined use cases.

See "Analytics software systems: worldwide market shares 2014" - here.

Qosmos Goes for Open-Source NFV w/OPNFV's Arno

Qosmos announced that it "..fully endorses OPNFV Arno as the first industry-standard, open source platform facilitating adoption of NFV. 

Qosmos’ vision is that future networks will be built on components and leverage open source frameworks. For components from different suppliers to work, they will need to be interlinked with standardized interfaces defined by organizations such as ETSI, ONF, and IETF. In addition, the new component-based architecture will be structured around open source software initiatives such as OPNFV".

"Arno is the first release to build upon the promise of OPNFV (see "OPNFV Delivers Open Source Software to Enable Deployment of Network Functions Virtualization Solutions" - here) —a carrier grade, integrated, open source platform to accelerate the introduction of new NFV products and services. This release provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture".

See "Qosmos Endorses OPNFV Arno as the First Release of an Industry-standard, Open Source NFV Platform" - here.

[Technavio]: 33% CAGR for Transparent Caching Market 2015-2019

A new report by Yechnavio finds that the "global transparent caching market is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 33% from 2015-2019.

.. over the last five years, global consumer Internet traffic has increased by more than five times. OTT content such as videos, file sharing, web surfing, and online gaming have grown significantly. Web surfing includes accessing web content, emails, and online data, apart from videos.

This is a small CAGR increase compared to the previous report predicting a 31.3% for 2013-2018 (here).

"The traffic is expected to increase from 34.29 Exabytes per month, in 2014, to over 98.16 Exabytes per month, by 2019. An increase in Internet traffic will increase the demand for transparent caching from network operators and MSOs. It will also help the operators provide the highest QoE to their subscribers and achieve cost efficiency.

Key Vendors: Akamai Technologies, Blue Coat Systems, Juniper Networks, PeerApp and Qwilt. 

Other Prominent Vendors: Alcatel-Lucent, Allot Communications, ARA Networks, Brocade, BTI Systems, Cisco Systems, Conversant, Fortinet, Google, Huawei, Level 3 Communications, MaraSystem, SuperLumin Networks, Swiftserve and VidScale".
    

See "Global Transparent Caching Market 2015-2019" - here and "Transparent Caching Market to Grow at 33% CAGR by 2019 Says a New Research Report at ReportsnReports.com" - here. 

[Infonetics]: Huawei and Cisco ($89M) are the PCC Market Leaders

 
Maywun Wong announced in Cisco's Service Provider blog that "Last week, we were thrilled to receive the news that Infonetics scored Cisco Policy Suite as a Leader in the Policy Management Scorecard. 

Cisco was one of only two leaders recognized by Infonetics in this space and was recognized for building “… up its position in the market rapidly after its acquisition of BroadHop [Dec '12; here], demonstrating strong momentum around policy virtualization”.

See also - 

• Policy Management Market Rises 27 Percent in 2014; VoLTE, Data Monetization Play Big Role" - here 
• [Infonetics]: "significant changes in the policy management vendor landscape" - here.  

See "Cisco Scores as Leader in the Infonetics Policy Management Scorecard" - here.

PCC / DPI Opportunity - RFI by Ethio Telecom

Ethio Telecom issued a "Request for Information (RFI) for the procurement policy and charging control (pcc) and deep packet inspection solution (dpi), RFI No. 3209012. The RFI remains floating from June 5, 2015 up to June 30, 2015".

This is the 2nd time we see a procurement  process for DPI - the first time was 4 years ago (here). In May 2012, it was published that Ethio was using DPI for censorship (here).

See "Invitation to international request for information (RFI) for the procurement of policy and charging control (PCC) and deep packet inspection solution (DPI)" - here.

Procera Enables MNOs to Measure Applications' QoE

Last month Procera Networks published the results of a survey, showing that although mobile users have QoE issues on a daily basis (here) they do not complain. To solve this user's laziness, Procera now unveiled a way for MNOs to measure users' QoE - their "biggest announcement of 2015", I am told.
 

".. ScoreCard, a new solution enabling improved visibility and measurement of the quality of experience (QoE) that operators’ networks are capable of delivering to subscribers. The solution reports scores separated into application categories that matter the most to subscribers, providing actionable insights about where QoE issues occur in the network and where to target investments and actions for operators to achieve maximum impact on the subscriber experience, network performance and ROI.

ScoreCard measures activities such as web surfing, streaming video, social media, real-time gaming, uploads, downloads and voice applications and scores each of these seven application categories using letter grades from A to F, clearly showing what level of QoE the network can deliver. 

The solution offers different views to visualize QoE by subscriber tier, device or location for operators to fix bottlenecks and prioritize investments. It scores the network by isolating potentially problematic factors including applications, devices, cell towers, latency or throughput and creates value for customer care, marketing, engineering and executive management departments at fixed or mobile broadband providers.

ScoreCard is an out-of-the-box ready solution for operators to deploy physically or virtually that visualizes scores by application, device, location, and subscriber tier. It gives operators the power to fix bottlenecks and make informed decisions about how to deliver an improved subscriber experience and manage subscriber expectations.

Its simplified intelligence enables CAPEX prioritization for improved ROI to justify the cost of network upgrades and build the best network while also benchmarking performance for engineers and consumers to analyze, contrast and compare service levels. This means that operators can avoid over-engineering in the wrong areas, create a more accurate investment plan and clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of any improvements made.

See "Procera Networks Defines Broadband Subscriber Experience with Scorecard" - here.

Anritsu Adds IneoQuest's Behavioral Video Analytics

 

IneoQuest Technologies announced that it has "..partnered with Anritsu Corporation to integrate its behavioral video analytics (Audience Measurement Platform – AMP) with Anritsu’s eoSightTM and eoLiveTM suite of products for advanced Customer Experience Analytics.

IneoQuest’s real-time video analytics capabilities add further business value to Anritsu’s growing customer base. By providing real-time data and video streams from the mobile infrastructure and client players, IneoQuest’s AMP solution will enable Anritsu to provide the most complete view of the customer experience down to the device and user level.

IneoQuest’s AMP Dashboard

..By incorporating IneoQuest’s real-time and historical analytics, Anritsu’s total solution bridges the gap between video service, network and customer experience through real-time dashboards and next-generation customer experience analytics, and provides the foundation for future monetization of high-value video services".

See "IneoQuest and Anritsu Announce Partnership to Provide Advanced Analytics for Video Customer Experience Management (vCEM)" - here.

Teclo Helps 3 MVNOs Reduce Hosting Costs by Halving Images Traffic

Teclo Networks announced that its "SSeries solution has recently been deployed by three European Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) to compress images and website resources as they are downloaded to a mobile handset. 

Since its installation, each MVNO has seen the traffic volume devoted to image transfers halved, with a corresponding decline in payments to host networks. As the S-Series is quick and easy to install within mobile network infrastructure, MVNOs can instantly secure major OPEX savings whilst still delivering a superfast web browsing experience to their subscribers".

See "Three European MVNOs deploy Teclo Networks’ S-Series solution to lower operating costs by compressing images" - here.

Vodafone: Video Portion Jumped from 37 to 48%; Does 4G Increase ARPU?

Vittorio Colao, 

CEO, 

Vodafone Group

Vodafone published its annual report for 2015 (here). The "CEO Strategic Review" has some interesting facts on Vodafone's activity:

• We have witnessed exceptional demand for data this year, whether 4G in Europe or 3G in emerging markets, with data growth totalling 80% for the full year, and accelerating every quarter in Europe. As video and music services proliferate, and data coverage widens and becomes more consistent, customers are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets for entertainment, work and social interaction.
   
• Our 4G customer base has quadrupled to 20.2 million. While progress has been rapid, still only 13% of our European customer base is on 4G, providing us with a very substantial opportunity for future growth.
   
• With quicker network response times, better in-building penetration and higher peak speeds, 4G is stimulating significant growth in data, with usage typically doubling when customers migrate from 3G to 4G .. Higher usage has helped drive higher revenues per customer in some markets, especially

Europe 4G customers

Europe average smartphone data usage

• As customers use more and more data it is important that we monetise this.  Higher usage has helped drive higher revenues per customer in some markets, especially in the UK where 4G data usage trends are particularly strong. In some markets, average revenue per user (‘ARPU’) has continued to fall as the benefit of increased data usage has not offset the fall in market prices
   

• 4G is driving an increase in data usage, both in absolute and per-user terms. On average our 4G customers use twice as much data as our 3G customers and that has helped average smartphone usage increase from 473MB to 755MB during the year. This is supported by the large increase in video streaming, which now accounts for 48% of data traffic.

Procera Networks' Acquisition Completed Successfully

Procera Networks is now a private company. The tender that was announced in April (here) has been completed. Do I am left with the other two players as far as revenues and other public reports are concerned. 

Francisco Partners Management announced the ".. results of its tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Procera Networks // for $11.50 per share .. as of the expiration of the tender offer at 12:00 a.m. New York City time at the end of the day on Thursday, June 4, 2015, a total of 16,529,499 shares of Procera common stock had been validly tendered and not validly withdrawn, representing approximately 79% of Procera’s outstanding shares .. the condition to the tender offer that a majority of Procera’s outstanding shares be validly tendered has now been satisfied and Francisco Partners intends to complete its acquisition of Procera later today"

See "Francisco Partners Announces Results of Tender Offer" - here.

[ABI] Encryption Drives Mobile Optimization to a $40B Over 5 Year Market

While many think that the legacy DPI, optimization and traffic management functions lose their role in network management due to customers' demand for QoE, OTT services and growing video traffic, ABI research thinks differently - and the reason is the use of encrypted traffic.

A new report by Joe Hoffman [pictured], Practice Director, Mobile Networks, ABI Research sees the "worldwide market for mobile network monitoring and optimization exceeding US$40 billion over the next 5 years... LTE uptake in China leads worldwide traffic growth, including video, and pulls along the monitoring and optimization markets. 

Widespread adoption of SSL-encryption changes the game from compression, transcoding and transrating to throttling, pacing and manipulating the Adaptive Bitrate Stream from the content provider to achieve operator goals. State-of-the-art traffic management technology delivers a better customer experience and virtual capacity gains that operators will appreciate.

Mobile optimization is more important than ever and the advent of all IP services, including VoLTE, VoWi-Fi, LTE-U / LAA requires close attention from the operator to assure QoE. With an eye to monetization, DPI, Optimization and Policy remain the largest segments and come together as part of a total revenue enhancement solution. 

All leading network infrastructure vendors, including Ericsson, Nokia Networks and Alcatel-Lucent, offer their own or partnered solutions.Likewise, the independents, such as Citrix ByteMobile and Openwave Mobility, provide differentiated, targeted and ready-to-use solutions for every mobile broadband operator"

See "LTE Adoption to Drive Network Monitoring and Optimization Spend Past US$40 Billion" - here.

Ericsson's 2020 Predictions: 14GB/Month, Smartphoneד, Video ...

Some highlights from Ericsson's new Mobility Report, forecasting how mobile data will look like in 2020:

• Advanced mobile technology will be commonplace around the globe: smartphone subscriptions will more than double, reaching 6.1 billion, 70% of the world's population will be using smartphones, and 90 percent will be covered by mobile broadband networks.

• Smartphone data is predicted to increase ten-fold, when 80 percent of all mobile data traffic will come from smartphones. Average monthly data usage per smartphone in North America will increase from 2.4 GB today to 14 GB by 2020.
•  26 billion connected devices 

• Mobile video traffic will grow by a staggering 55 percent per year and will constitute around 60 percent of all mobile data traffic by the end of that period. Growth is largely driven by shifting user preferences towards video streaming services, and the increasing prevalence of video in online content including news, advertisements and social media.

See "Ericsson Mobility Report: 70 percent of world's population using smartphones by 2020" - here.

AT&T Will Manage Data Demand w/Software-centric Approach

Sean Buckley reports to FierceTelecom on Andre Fuetsch [pictured], senior VP of architecture and design for AT&T presentation at the TIA 2015 Network of the Future event, about how the carrier deals with the demand for data, and growth of video streaming traffic:

• When we were predominantly a voice service provider, the capacity engineer only worried about one day out of the year, which was Mother's Day ,, it was pretty predictable ..now, traffic capacity planning for AT&T and other large telcos is all about planning for the unexpected traffic bursts caused by users viewing the latest celebrity videos online
   
• The traffic capacity engineer has to worry about the latest Kardashian streaming video, who has been watching House of Cards [see "Procera: Netflix' House of Cards Stats; Need 27GB to See it All" - here].. the biggest event we worry about is when Apple releases their next big iOS upgrade [see "Apple IOS8 Update - DDoS Attack? Can Cache Help?" - here]
   
• To stay on pace with these unpredictable demands, the current hardware-based network approach won't suffice. A software-centric approach will help AT&T deal with these network spikes
   
• Unlike the telcos, web-based companies did not have the money or time to build a bottom-up network architecture. AT&T wants to adopt a similar strategy where it will build a network, applications and services in a software-centric approach
   
• One of the first implementations that will be using this AT&T integrated cloud is our Network on Demand function, ,.. This is basically the first SDN-based service that we now recently opened up in more than 100 U.S. cities that gives enterprise customers the ability to dynamically control the bandwidth they need between their sites ..  AT&T has set possibly the most ambitious software-centric goals for its network: virtualize software control to 75 percent of network by the year 2020.

See "AT&T's Fuetsch: Apple's iOS software updates 'biggest event we worry about' on network" - here.

[ABI]: Wi-Fi Offload Traffic Volume will Exceed All Cellular Traffic

Just after Opera Software added features to handle Wi-Fi congestion (here) ABI Research finds that Wi-Fi offloading is growing at a "double-digit rate".

A new report by Nick Marshall [pictured], Research Director, ABI  Research forecasts that "..rapidly increasing offload of cellular traffic to Wi-Fi will reach over 17 exabytes per month by 2018 – greater than all of 2G, 3G, and 4G cellular traffic combined.

..In-building wireless data traffic will grow at a double-digit rate to reach more than 50 exabytes per month worldwide in 2020 .. Video remains the dominant traffic type with traffic volume outstripping all other traffic types, while in the enterprise and commercial segment sports venues, transportation and healthcare continue to be the verticals which transport the most traffic with shopping malls and hospitality coming in a close second place.

..DAS (distributed antenna systems) and Mobile Equipment vendors are poised to benefit from this explosion in traffic. Leading companies include Alcatel-Lucent, Axell Wireless, Cisco, CommScope, Corning, Dali Wireless, Ericsson, Goodman Networks, JMA Wireless, Nokia Networks, TE Connectivity, Wireless Telecom Group and Zinwave. These companies and others will benefit from increased DAS spending as Mobile Broadband Operators densify networks to meet this explosion in mobile traffic".

See "Global In-Building Off-load to Exceed 17 EB per Month—Critical Leverage for Mobile Broadband Operators" - here.

Opera Fights Wi-Fi Congestion

Opera Software announced that its "New Opera Max version includes a Wi-Fi data-savings option. The data-compression app will allow users to control their mobile data and Wi-Fi data independently. With 80% of all data usage on Wi-Fi networks, Wi-Fi savings has been the number-one requested feature by Opera Max users.

• Users experiencing Wi-Fi network congestion will enjoy a faster connection experience with this new compression feature, as they can see how apps are using their data and track how their apps behave on Wi-Fi.
   
• With the new App Blocking feature, users can prevent apps from tracking them or using data without their permission, as well as being able to stop apps from running in the background to conserve precious battery life. The “Blocked Apps” section gives users complete control over mobile data access and Wi-Fi data access.

See "Faster Wi-Fi experience with new Opera Max compression technology" - here.