Mobile Optimization: What You Need to Know

The rapid adoption of sophisticated mobile data devices - including Google’s Android (News - Alert) platform as well as Apple’s iPhone and iPad - is powering an explosion of traffic volume on wireless networks around the globe. Today’s mobile users are increasingly consuming video and other data-intensive applications that are generating a level of traffic far greater than has been produced by traditional web browsing. While mobile network operators are enjoying revenue growth from data subscriptions, they are also experiencing rapid escalation of traffic, which is outpacing available network capacity and adversely affecting quality of service.

Findings from Bytemobile’s second-quarter 2011 Mobile Analytics Report demonstrate that video now generates up to 60 percent of the total volume in wireless networks worldwide. With the rise of full-length and studio-quality videos and live streaming of multimedia content on mobile devices, as well as the emergence of two-way video communications, the company expects mobile data traffic to spike to an all-time high this year. Today’s consumers expect the same level of experience on their high-end mobile devices and tablet computers as they’ve had on their traditional laptops or desktop PCs. This further intensifies the importance of providing a quality viewing experience. Unfortunately, as a majority of network operators have already seen, the growth of mobile data traffic has resulted in significant network congestion and therefore a diminished user experience.

A rise in mobile TV viewership results in more higher-quality content going across the network and operators need to ensure they have policies in place that shape access and bandwidth in a way that means a single subscriber cannot take up all available bandwidth. For example, offering improved resolution for mobile TV across just 10 percent of subscribers can have a 30-40 percent additional impact on capacity consumed and therefore affect the remaining 90 percent of subscribers’ user experience.

As data traffic continues to increase, not only will the user experience deteriorate, but operators will have to implement stringent billing policies to curtail data usage. As we have seen in the transition from 2G to 3G, it will become critical for operators to serve more users and traffic within their existing infrastructure and offer a better user experience to reduce churn and remain competitive in the 4G environment.

The gap between user expectations and congestion-impacted service is not only frustrating to consumers, but also creates new challenges for operators. Mobile operators are prioritizing investments to make their networks able to handle more subscribers and bandwidth and latency-dependent applications. Various strategies include data offload, RAN-sharing and backhaul upgrades. They will also deploy “Smart Capacity” solutions in their networks to better utilize existing capacity and increase customer satisfaction. Smart Capacity solutions can reduce network download volumes by 40-60 percent – further decreasing the cost of content while improving the overall economics of mobile video and other data services offered by operators.

Adding raw bandwidth to increase capacity by 40-50 percent will see an operator’s CAPEX rise by approximately $3-4 billion. Alternatively, the same operator could spend $2 billion to add 20 percent capacity, optimize accrued capacity to the cost of tens of millions and realize a total capacity increase of 60 percent (40 percent from optimization technology).

Mobile optimization and traffic management not only reduce the amount of traffic on mobile networks, but also help to improve the overall user experience. These technologies provide device (and application) aware intelligence in the network and let operators achieve the best utilization of their existing network assets, including spectrum. When combined with LTE (News - Alert), they can help operators meet explosive traffic demand and high user expectations.

Ronny Haraldsvik is vice president of global marketing at Bytemobile, where he is responsible for the company’s worldwide marketing strategy and product marketing.

About Ronny Haraldsvik

Ronny Haraldsvik is responsible for worldwide marketing strategy and product marketing at Bytemobile (News - Alert). He joined the company in 2010, with more than 20 years of telecommunications industry experience, including wireless broadband, IP services, software, personal computing, and consumer devices.

Prior to Bytemobile, Haraldsvik spent more than 10 years as Vice President of Marketing at a succession of wireless and IP networking companies focused on infrastructure technology for mobile network operators. These companies included SpiderCloud Wireless, Alien Technology, Flarion Technologies, Tahoe Networks, and Shasta Networks, an IP services business unit of Nortel Networks. He also served as vice president of Mobile Broadband at Qualcomm (News - Alert) and has held vice president roles at Flarion Technologies and Nortel Networks.

Earlier in his career, Haraldsvik served as director of field marketing at Bay Networks. He earned a B.A. degree in Business from the University of San Francisco.