About M2F [Machine-to-Facebook] Mobile Traffic

Here is what Facebook says in its recent Registration Statement to the SEC (here):

"Our metrics are also affected by applications on certain mobile devices that automatically contact our servers for regular updates with no user action involved, and this activity can cause our system to count the user associated with such a device as an active user on the day such contact occurs. We estimate that less than 5% of our estimated worldwide DAUs [daily active users] as of December 31, 2011 and 2010 resulted from this type of automatic mobile activity, and that this type of activity had a substantially smaller effect on our estimate of worldwide MAUs [monthly active users] and mobile MAUs. The impact of this automatic activity on our metrics varies by geography because mobile usage varies in different regions of the world".

This may not be significant in terms of traffic, but joins the general phenomena of "signaling" /"keep-alive" traffic, in different communication layers. However, it does impose load on mobile networks, for example in the number of concurrent connections/PDP contexts etc - with questionable value to the user.

Another example at the application layer: VoIP (see "NTT Explains Outage and its $1.5B Corrective Action" - here)

Caching Announcements: Qwilt Unveils Transparent-video Delivery Solution

Qwilt, the start-up that partially came out of stealth mode last October (see "Qwilt [Partially] Exposed - "identifies, monitors, stores and delivers Internet video" - here) and raised $24M, has finally announced unveiled a product.

The company announced the "..release of its QB-Series transparent-video delivery solution, a transformative product that gives carriers unprecedented and cost-efficient control over Internet-video traffic in their networks .. The QB-Series product packs the ability to identify, monitor, store and deliver video content on fixed or mobile networks onto a single platform, as opposed to the more cumbersome, “bolted-together” solutions on the market today .. Qwilt testing reveals a performance gain of at least 5x over such competing products".

The transparent-caching/CDN and the mix of the two saw many announcements during the recent year:

• Frost & Sullivan estimates the market for transparent caching "..to grow from $140M in 2011 to $708M by 2015" (here)
   
• Competitors list includes pure players such as PeerApp (here), Bluecoat (here), Oversi (here), Verivue (here), DiViNetworks (here) and Saguna (here); CDN providers Limelight (here) and as a feature of optimization solutions - Bytemobile (here) as well as Alcatel-Lucent (here), Juniper (here) and Cisco (here)
   
• Recent deployments made by Citarella (here), Lebanon Online (here), CallPlus (here), BT Wholesale (here).     

 Alon Maor (pictured), Qwilt's CEO said: “More than 50 carriers worldwide with whom we are engaged are telling us that existing solutions to the online-video challenge are hard to deploy and use, and they don’t scale well as the network grows .. Qwilt, on the other hand, took a blank-slate approach, so we were able to design a new, single-platform solution that is significantly faster and more powerful than competitors'”.

See "Qwilt Unveils Unified, Transparent Caching Solution for Online-Video Delivery" - here.