For operators worried by increasing delivery infrastructure costs and soaring budgets, mobile broadband gateway developer Stoke reportedly has good news.
As the demand for mobile data services reaches unprecedented levels, Stoke (News - Alert) says hope comes in the form of increased sales.
In the evolving field of mobile broadband, many strategies are devised around the need to cut costs and stay profitable. To achieve this, converged networks that provide mobile broadband will need reliable density and offload capabilities. Currently, operators may not support closed vendor solutions as they will mainly be concerned with cutting costs.
For many operators, wholesale upgrading of their networks is not affordable in these tough times. As an alternative, many of them are offloading Internet-bound traffic away from their private networks and onto public IP networks to cater to the demands of customers.
Vikash Varma, chief executive officer at Stoke, said, “We are convinced that the 2009 priority for Mobile Network providers is to reduce the cost per bit of mobile data and off-load internet bound traffic as quickly as possible to allow them to support the surge in demand – without engaging in a full-scale infrastructure upgrade.”
Even in the tough times, Stoke claims that the company has witnessed an increase in the sales of its Stoke Session Exchange gateways during Q3 and Q4, 2008. Stoke claims that the mobile broadband market will get many benefits such as flexibility, capacity and cost-efficiency through its gateway.
Capable of aggregating up to 240,000 femtocell access points in a compact 5RU form factor, the Stoke SSX-3000 offers an exponential increase in session density over alternative gateways.
TMC President Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) has more general advice that could serve not only tight-fisted mobile solutions companies, but all of IT and beyond: in this environment, the people who make purchasing decisions will look to purchase from companies they deem stable.
“How do they determine stability?” Tehrani asks. “Through outward appearance.”
Small companies and those who have reported negative earnings are at greatest risk, he says, particularly as customers know small companies are not generally well-capitalized.
“In response, all companies need to over saturate the markets they serve with the best news they can create,” Tehrani said. “This is regardless of how well they are doing. If sales are generally good now, it makes even more sense to focus on putting a halo around your brand to protect it from bad times which may or may not be ahead. Customer wins, new product launches, a new green data center, a widget that does something useful - if you have any of these, issue a release and try to get some positive media coverage.”
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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Michael Dinan