Cisco Unveils Three Business Video Solutions at Mobile World Congress

Cisco Systems has unveiled a threesome of new solutions aimed at helping wireless service providers monetize and optimize their networks, particularly related video.

The company introduced its new MOVE (which stands for monetization, optimization, and Videoscape Experience) solutions at the onset of the 2011 GSMA Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona. Current products under the MOVE umbrella include Cisco Mobile Videoscape, Cisco Service Provider WiFi and Cisco Adaptive Intelligent Routing (AIR).

“MOVE is the next phase of Cisco’s (News - Alert) Service Provider Mobility strategy, which was introduced at last year’s Mobile World Congress after Cisco acquired Starent Networks (News - Alert),” said Ash Dahod, senior vice president and general manager of the mobile Internet technology group at Cisco.

Cisco Mobile Videoscape is the mobile version of the Videoscape solution the company’s President and CEO John Chambers (News - Alert) introduced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At the time, Chambers explained that Videoscape will make the user interface consistent across all user devices. It also keeps all devices in sync so if, for example, a consumer gets a video message from a friend, that message will appear both on the user’s laptop, on his TV and his phone.

Jon Morgan, senior manager of Cisco’s service provider marketing organization, added that Mobile Videoscape, which is available now, also allows service providers to transcode and transrate over-the-top traffic and cache it in different formats. He said that allows providers to cache popular content closer to users if they want, and will enable them to have more control over such traffic should network congestion occur.

Solutions like this are important, Cisco has emphasized, given the growing prominence of video use and video-related applications. Indeed, the most current Cisco Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2010 to 2015 indicates that two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2015. And it reports that mobile video traffic is expected to more than double every year between 2010 and 2015.

The new Cisco Mobile Videoscape solution leverages new technology on the Cisco ASR 5000 and Cisco Unified Computing System platforms to link the mobile network to the larger video distribution network enabled by the Cisco Content Delivery Network capabilities of Cisco Videoscape. It also taps the Cisco Videoscape Media Suite to manage content across multiple screens.

The Cisco Service Provider Wi-Fi Solution, meanwhile, enables service providers to offload mobile data from their cellular networks.Not only does the solution allow service providers to free up capacity on their networks by moving some traffic to WiFi (News - Alert), it also provides seamless security/authentication and can help the carrier to support various new revenue-generating services. This solution leveragesCisco Next Generation Hotspot technology and the new Cisco Aironet 1550 Series Outdoor Wireless Access Point with Cisco CleanAir technology. The 1550 is a high-end access point for use outdoors. Available next month, it’s in betas now.

Jaishree Subramania, senior manager of marketing solutions at Cisco, said that the WiFi solution allows for authentication from a single point within the service provider network, helps maintain session persistence, and enables handoff between cellular and WiFi networks – allowing for a seamless and secure customer experience.

“We are committed to improving our user's experience on WiFi,” said Philippe Lucas, senior vice president of standardisation and ecosystems development at Orange (News - Alert).“That is why Orange is involved in the Cisco Next Generation Hotspot initiative with other industry players to develop seamless connectivity between 3G and WiFi. We believe that a SIM-based authentication model will bring simplicity and enhanced security for customers, especially when roaming. We currently rely on Cisco’s network capabilities to provide Orange WiFi access in public hotspots covering more than 2,000 sites in France.”

As for Cisco Adaptive Intelligent Routing (or AIR), it is delivered via the Cisco ASR 1000, Cisco ASR 5000 and Cisco ASR 9000 platforms and was designed to lower the cost of supporting mobile data traffic. AIR is available now for 3G networks.

Morgan explained that AIR ties the intelligence of the mobile core into rest of the IP network. It leverages the control plane in the ASR5000 and uses that to control existing routers to branch traffic off to existing nodes, rather than requiring service providers to install new nodes. That’s much less expensive and reduces latency in the network. Today, he added, mobile networks are hierarchical, but with this new architecture, service providers can offload traffic at any point in the network without having to traverse a lot of network elements to terminate traffic.