[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 Acquires ABR Specialist Azuki

Ericsson announced it has "..entered into an agreement to acquire Massachusetts-based Azuki Systems [see "Azuki Helps Service Providers Manage OTT Media" - here] a provider of TV Anywhere delivery platforms for service providers, content owners and broadcasters ..  Through the acquisition, Ericsson will accelerate the availability of new and compelling viewing experiences across a variety of devices and screens. In addition, Ericsson will gain additional key functionality related to the deployment of TV Anywhere services, including adaptive bit rate and content protection technologies. In addition, the acquisition brings a team of highly skilled software engineers from Azuki Systems".

See "Ericsson extends television and media leadership via acquisition of Azuki Systems" - here.

Citrix Enhances Bytemobile w/Internet Radio Opt, User Experience Indexing, More Protocols

Citrix announced the ".. release of ByteMobile 7 ..  available now for deployment on the T-Series Adaptive Traffic Management System (see "Bytemobile Launches Integrated DPI, Caching, Optimization and NI Solution""- here)

Among the new features: 

• Internet Radio Optimization: Managing the Mobile Music Boom .. to provide mobile operators with the tools to confront this reality, enabling them to reduce Internet radio traffic volume by up to 30 percent with no perceptible effect on the subscriber listening experience. 

• User Experience Indexing: Measuring What Subscribers Actually See: Separate scores for web and video experience, each based on a greater number of factors encompassing both content delivery and visual quality; The ability to establish any given subscriber’s absolute UXI score and a relative UXI score, which assesses that user’s experience relative to other users; The ability for operators to ingest, in real-time, per-subscriber UXI scores for use in analysing—and responding to—trends in the individual and collective subscriber experience.
   
• Adaptive Optimization: Apply When Needed .. a second generation of adaptive optimization and related capabilities, which include: Video stalling is reduced by up to 30 percent .. The required degree of optimization, if any, for a specific user is predicted based on a running history of factors such as UXI score and available network bandwidth .. File downloads are up to 30 percent faster, with the greatest benefits seen on LTE networks.
   
• IP Traffic Classification: A Key Enabler for Consolidation - the T-Series is now able to classify more than 800 different IP applications and protocols representing the full scope of data traffic across the network. These classification abilities give mobile operators all the tools necessary to collapse separate DPI elements into a single adaptive traffic management element.
  

See "Citrix Supercharges Mobile Subscriber Experience with ByteMobile 7" - here.

[Infonetics]: Adaptive Bitrate is a Key for Efficient OTT Delivery

   

A new report by Jeff Heynen [pictured], principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV, Infonetics Research finds that "..The global broadcast and streaming video equipment market topped $2 billion in 2012 and is forecast by Infonetics to grow about 12% in 2013 .. Projected to grow by more than 1/3 by 2017, adaptive bitrate (ABR) origin and packaging servers are key components in the efficient delivery of over-the-top (OTT) content, especially as more pay-TV providers and content delivery networks move to ABR streaming".

See "OTT video, multiscreen push pay-TV operators to invest in adaptive bitrate gear, transcoders" - here.

Optimization Announcements: RGB Networks Packages Streaming Video In Real-time for Adaptive Bitrate

  
RGB Networks announced a "..new “just-in-time” packaging (JITP) capabilities to its award-winning TransAct Packager. This new technology enables video service providers (VSPs) to deliver adaptive bitrate video-on-demand (VOD), network digital video recorder (NDVR) and TV Everywhere services without pre-packaging all their video assets in each of the adaptive streaming protocols, thus reducing the need for costly storage and network bandwidth, and allowing VSPs to more quickly and cost-effectively expand their TV Everywhere libraries". 

".. Rather than having to pre-package all the profiles of every one of their programs in all adaptive streaming protocols, VSP’s simply package programs in real time into the appropriate protocol only when that content is requested by viewers on a specific device. This JITP substantially reduces the need to add additional storage and enables VSPs to manage their storage and bandwidth costs as their libraries of content available for multiscreen distribution grow".

See "RGB Networks’ Just-in-Time-Packaging Streamlines Delivery of VOD, NDVR and TV Everywhere Services and Reduces Expensive Storage and Bandwidth Costs" - here. 

PeerApp: “Caching is the future of Optimization”

   
Few days ago I met Shmulik Bachar, VP of products and marketing, PeerApp, in its R&D site.

PeerApp, according to Frost and Sullivan recent research, leads the transparent cache market (see “F&S: Transparent caching market to Reach $708M by 2015; PeerApp Leads” – here). In 2011, the market had estimated revenues of $140M.

Some of the Q&A we had:

Q: Who do you see now in the caching market?

A: As direct competitors we mainly see Blue Coat. Note that we are also selling through OEMs, which includes Allot Communications and BTI Systems.

Q: What about the cache offering from Juniper, Cisco and the video optimization vendors?

A: These companies do not compete with us directly. They use caching as internal mechanism in their solutions, but not as a solution for optimizing Over the Top (OTT) traffic, as we do.

Q: We saw recently some announcements of integrated Carrier CDN and transparent caching solutions. Are the two will finally become one?

A: In many cases, carriers like to see one solution. This is why we announced a joint solution with Edgecast (here), and Verivue, who came from CDN solution side is now adding transparent caching (here). Transparent caching and CDN provide the carrier with similar benefits, although the technical solution for transparent caching and CDN is different.

Q: What is the business case for transparent caching? It is still about bandwidth savings?

A: It is no longer just savings, except for specific regions. The main goal now is to improve the subscriber’s quality of Experience (QoE) and monetize OTT services.

Q: Monetize? How?

A: One example, implemented by some of our customers, is the ability to sell higher tiers of service (usually volume-based) knowing that caching will enable better QoE.

Q: How about PeerApp? Where is it going?

A: We continue to focus on caching. It is the future of optimization, both for fixed and mobile operators. I believe that the different Adaptive Bitrate technologies (from Apple, Microsoft and Adobe) will make the other real-time/network based video optimization technologies (see here) redundant. Caching has real value, for bandwidth savings, QoE improvement and monetization.

PeerApp is doing very well, we closed a $8M investment last year (here) and we are working on additional OEM opportunities to expand our reach to other elements of the core network.

Cisco: "LTE will not solve 3G problems; Network-Based Optimization is needed"

 
Jonathan Morgan, Director, MITG Product Marketing and Jim O’Leary (pictured), Senior Manager, Mobile Solutions Marketing, both from Cisco, presented in a webinar, hosted by Light Reading, Cisco's video optimization architecture for mobile networks.

According to Cisco, optimization is crucial for mobile networks (while some think that Adaptive Bit Rate will replace it). See below few slides from the presentation. DPI also plays a role along optimization - it steers
only video traffic into video solution to reduce load.

[Strategy Analytics]: "Mobile video optimization is a hot topic for 2012"; Shows Market Landscape

 
[The Broadband Traffic Management Blog 2012 Survey explores the issues discussed in this post. Click here to tell us what you think!]
   
A new report by Susan Welsh de Grimaldo (pictured), Director, Strategy Analytics, concludes that "Mobile video optimization is a hot topic for 2012—with a complicated and shifting landscape of technologies, vendors and operator issues and objective .. Operators need to deploy a set of mobile video optimization solutions that can scale with the growth of video traffic—solutions that can compress videos, reduce their data rates, cache popular videos, or even reschedule or move video delivery to less costly, more available networks [see chart below]". 

".. Alcatel Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Juniper and NSN all offer a range of optimization covering the data and control planes including strong policy management solutions. ... Specialized solutions vendors typically deliver steering, transrating, transcoding, DPI and caching functionality. Vendors in this category include Bytemobile, F5, Flash Networks, Mobixell, OnMobile, Openwave, Radware, Radisys, Skyfire and Vantrix. Most operate as a proxy or transparent proxy attached to either the Gi Interface of the GGSN or to a Core Router API .. F5 and Radware provide steering solutions that interpret video application requests and steer connections to the best optimization resources..".

"Even in the early stages of the market, many basic video optimization techniques have been widely deployed. In 2011, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Policy Control Enforcement Functions (PCEF) at Layers 2 and 3 .. buffer optimization and caching in the mobile core and at the edge of the fixed network, traffic steering and redirection, and multiple TCP proxies to intercept traffic flows have proliferated across networks. Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) has been implemented by the OTT content providers. Solutions have been focused on ‘pain points’ rather than on system-wide deployments".

See "Executive Summary: Mobile Video Optimization Reports" - here.

BBC Uses Adaptive Bitrate Optimization with its New iPlayer Over 3G/Wi-Fi App

The BBC announced that a new version of its iPlayer iOS application (for iPhone and iPad) now allows viewing content over a 3G connection rather than Wi-Fi only and uses Adaptive Bitrate technology. An Android application will be available soon.

David Madden, Executive Product Manager for BBC iPlayer on mobile, writes to the BBC Interent Blog that "We have worked closely with the network operators to introduce 3G streaming and create a great mobile experience so you can watch your favourite TV programme wherever you are or listen to the radio when you are out and about"

"We have also done a lot of work to improve the playback experience on portable devices and have rolled out HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) video infrastructure for the apps, which uses adaptive bitrate technologies. This enables us to detect the strength of your Wi-Fi or 3G connection and serve the appropriate video quality. If you have low internet signal strength then the video stream will adapt down to suit your connection speed; if you move onto a stronger signal then the video stream will automatically improve in quality. The idea is to give you the best possible experience wherever you are" 



Source: Apple



 

Earlier this year BBC said it will allow users to track their [fixed] ISP performance (see "BBC's Traffic-Light System will Test ISP's QoS" - here). I wonder if we will see the same over the new 3G access.
 

David provides some statistics on iPlayer - "There have been record figures for BBC iPlayer on mobile with 1.5 million installs on the Apple iPad and 1.2 million installs on Android devices since we launched the apps in February 2011. In October 2011 alone 16.5 million programmes were watched on mobile devices and tablets, up by 129% from this time last year"

See "BBC iPlayer: iPhone app and 3G streaming across all mobile networks" - here.