Boom Time in Carrier Wi-Fi

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

There’s a boom underway for carrier Wi-Fi as many carriers realize that LTE won’t be enough to meet the predicted growth in bandwidth demand for mobile Internet services.

Industry research firm Infonetics predicts that the carrier Wi-Fi equipment market will grow to $2.1 billion by 2016. Already, the firm found 35% growth in the market for Wi-Fi access points from 2010 to 2011. Another proof point: AT&T Wireless, the most aggressive Wi-Fi provider of US carriers, has said that in 2012, smartphone connections to its Wi-Fi network more than doubled to 2.7 billion.

One reason for the growth is new high-speed Wi-Fi technology like 5 Gbps 802.11ac that is now coming on-market and is a great fit for metro Wi-Fi deployments.

Another reason is that carriers are rethinking their entire RAN strategy and moving from tightly managed infrastructure of macro cells to a more ad hoc infrastructure that includes small cells and hot spots. This cultural shift is opening more doors for Wi-Fi offloading.

Once the dust settles, carriers will realize that an important component of this shift is Wi-Fi offload software that drives mobile data traffic to carrier-owned or carrier-sponsored Wi-Fi sources while still ensuring a high-quality subscriber experience.

Wi-Fi offload is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to accommodating the ever-increasing demands placed on carrier networks. But not paying attention to the offload question could mean customer service problems.

Consider the case of Deutsche Telekom, which recently announced a deal to expand its hotspot network in Germany to more than 2.5 million hotspots through a deal with Spanish crowdsourced Wi-Fi hotspot provider, Fon (pronounced “phone”).

People open up their hotspots to Fon in exchange for free roaming services or payments based on usage. This is an innovative concept, but the two companies will need to have tools in place to make sure the end user Wi-Fi experience is a good one. Otherwise a smartphone could enter into an underpowered or old-technology Fon hotspot that would deliver performance that is poorer than the cellular network. If the phone were forced to switch to Wi-Fi without considering quality of experience metrics, unhappy customers would likely follow.

Our Open Channel Seamless Mobility and Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE software help create a positive experience for subscribers in offloading situations. Seamless Mobility provides uninterrupted data service for applications as devices move between the carrier network and Wi-Fi sources. Wi-Fi QoE helps to ensure that the user will have a satisfactory quality of experience before an offloading decision is executed. The software measures subscriber QoE continuously and in real time, allowing carriers to drive data traffic to Wi-Fi while improving the customer experience. It’s a win/win for both mobile operators and their subscribers.

Even though Wi-Fi offload has been an element of operational strategies for years, carriers can see the writing on the wall regarding LTE overloading and have started to act. Seamless network transitions and subscriber QoE are critical parts of making this heterogeneous network strategy successful.

Posted in Industry Trends, Mobile Devices, Mobile Technology, Open Channel, Open Channel Seamless Mobility, Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE, Wi-Fi | Leave a comment

“All You Can App” Mobile Services

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

There’s a new buffet coming to your smartphone soon. It’s called “all you can app” (AYCA).

The idea is that smartphone users will be able to choose from a menu of service plans that, for a fixed monthly subscription, include unlimited access to specific mobile applications – defined within each plan – and bundled together with connectivity charges.

In a recent article on its Technology, Media & Telecommunications website, Deloitte predicted that this year between 50 and 100 mobile operators will offer AYCA services, and that over the course of the year the portfolio of these services should grow.

Deloitte says that AYCA services will be aimed primarily at stimulating usage among customers that are late-comers to the mobile data world and are hesitant about accessing mobile data because they worry about incurring unexpected charges.

Deloitte estimates that by the end of 2013, about 400 million of the 1.9 billion smartphone subscribers may never or only rarely (less than once a week) use their device to connect to the Internet. In addition, a large proportion of the four billion mobile customers still using standard feature phones may upgrade to a smartphone.

These subscribers need mobile data pricing options that: are perceived as low risk; remove some of the barriers to app and data downloading; and are appropriate for later adopters.

We at SEVEN Networks believe the “all you can app” concept has merit, particularly as carriers market to users who fall later on the technology adoption curve.  Operators will be able to penetrate into more of their total potential market by targeting subscriber needs more precisely. They will better tap into subscribers’ willingness to pay, allowing them to more fully monetize their investment in wireless network infrastructure.

We predict that as they seek to offer these “all you can app” services, carriers will be looking for simpler, more effective, policy-based means of creating and administering these plans. That is where Open Channel Policy Enforcement comes in. Most techniques for implementing mobile traffic management policies today are too complex and rely on in-network enforcement. That means that the data traffic from apps that are outside of a purchased service plan can be stopped only after it has already crossed the radio access network.

Open Channel Policy Enforcement gives carriers fine-grained policy-based control over data traffic, meaning that they have the power to allow access only to those apps on a specific user’s service plan. Because these policy controls are applied at the mobile client, radio network resources are conserved. Open Channel Policy Enforcement also significantly simplifies service plan creation.

If “all you can app” becomes a major trend as Deloitte predicts, this kind of control will really make a difference in carriers’ overall efficiency, and ultimately in their business results. We encourage carriers who seek to offer these types of service plans to consider Open Channel Policy Enforcement as a tool for helping them better serve the needs of their customers.

 

Posted in Industry Trends, Mobile Devices, Mobile Technology, Open Channel | Leave a comment

Chatty Apps Update: Your Smartphone Makes More Calls Than You Do

Posted on April 8, 2013 by

We’ve written in this blog before about what a problem chatty apps can be for carriers – overwhelming radio network infrastructure or degrading the performance of mobile data sessions.

But according to a recent four-country study, those apps are getting ever more chatty, to the point that smartphones – not users – are making the “vast majority” of the network connections.

That’s the conclusion from an article written by Kelly Hill in RCR Wireless based on a survey from Actix, a network analytics firm.  The survey was based on data from eight carriers and looked mostly at 3G networks (only because 4G networks didn’t have the data volumes to be problematic – yet).

From the story: “The report…found that on 3G networks smartphones were generating data traffic 85% of the time, while only about 10% of their traffic was voice-related.  Meanwhile, less than 30% of those mobile data sessions were initiated by the subscriber.  Smartphones were making three to 10 data connections per hour of use, and 60% to 70% of the sessions were less than 50 kilobytes in size.”

It seems that the core network is not overly impacted by this data traffic, however the radio access network is seriously being impacted:  “Overall, the report concluded that the radio access network is responsible for about 80% to 85% of poor voice quality, and data sessions in congested areas ‘often fall below video-ready speeds.’”

The problem promises to continue growing over time, as new smartphones get faster processors, additional storage and 4G network speeds.  In fact, the report said that users on smartphones released within the last year generated 2.5X more traffic than phones from 2009.

These statistics back up our contention that policy enforcement and signaling optimization are best accomplished at the handset.  Solutions that manage mobile data traffic  from inside the core network address the problem only after half the battle has already been lost. That’s because once data traffic has reached the core network, radio network resources have already been consumed.  Our Open Channel family of software products for mobile traffic management and optimization conserve radio network resources by extending control to the source of data traffic – the mobile client itself.

Posted in Network Congestion, Open Channel | Leave a comment

Industry Talks Mobile Traffic Management at OMA Meeting

Posted on March 19, 2013 by

by David Puron

Recently, SEVEN joined the Open Mobile Alliance to collaborate with our industry counterparts on solutions that will help manage and optimize data traffic on mobile networks.

Our timing was perfect. While my colleagues in Redwood City were launching new software products in our Open Channel traffic management product line, I was in snowy Budapest overlooking the Royal Castle District, hearing about two new OMA initiatives that will contribute to the effort to reduce signaling and bandwidth congestion on the mobile network.

Here’s an update on those two technologies:

Always On Initiative: Some apps are always on, meaning they are always connected to the server to deliver timely content updates. As more apps turn to the cloud for updates or data storage, the challenges created by always-on apps will grow. The committee tackling this initiative is still in exploratory mode: evaluating the technical challenges of these apps and what that can mean to the mobile network. Open Channel Signaling Optimization is a great fit for this challenge, because it is designed to optimize the signaling activity of chatty mobile apps. The value added by Signalizing Optimization, compared to a “push-like” engine approach, is that it is able to dramatically reduce unnecessary signaling in a way that is fully transparent to the apps, and does not need any app re-coding or registration in servers.

Device and Network Efficiency: The ‘DANE’ working group was formed to help operators find ways to improve the quality of experience for applications. The core of the discussion was about standardizing device APIs to build in the potential for an app to request “premium” quality of service on the cell network. This group discussion quickly turned to how to better utilize Wi-Fi networks. The challenges here revolve around connection management issues, including how an app can switch to Wi-Fi without interruption depending on network conditions or policies. Thanks to SEVEN’s recent acquisition of SNRLabs, the Open Channel product line of software products now includes solutions to address these issues.

It was exciting for me to exchange ideas with these working groups and the other peers that I met during this meeting. The feedback I received confirmed for me that the Open Channel platform is on the right track, and will play a big role in helping the industry improve network performance.

Posted in Mobile Events, Mobile Technology, Network Congestion | Leave a comment

Mobile World Congress 2013: Handsets and Tablets Aplenty

Posted on March 1, 2013 by

This year’s Mobile World Congress kicked off Monday in a brand new venue in Barcelona. As the show closed yesterday, here’s a roundup of what we read and observed from our meeting room in Hall 2.

Handsets, Handsets and More Handsets – The Seattle Times reported on the various handset announcements from the Windows 8 Pro, Nokia’s Lumia 520 and 720 and the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

Handsets and Tablets Collide – Wired reported that tablets are a big trend at this year’s conference as Samsung debuted its Galaxy Note 8.0 – an 8-inch, 1280 x 800 display with the ability to be assigned a phone number and make calls.

And Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported on “The 3 Most-Important Things at Mobile World Congress” which included infrastructure tech, automaker apps and handset austerity.

Of course we also consider infrastructure tech to be one of the most important parts of Mobile World Congress, with our own Open Channel launch covered by RCRWireless.

More handsets, the crossover of phone-enabled tablets and more apps mean increased signaling and traffic on the wireless network. Mobile traffic management and optimization are top concerns for the team here at SEVEN and given these headlines from this year’s Mobile World Congress, it appears 2013 will be yet another heavy year for the network. Stay tuned for more on these coming trends and technologies.

Posted in Mobile Events, Mobile Technology, Open Channel | Leave a comment

What We Told Industry Analysts and the Press about Our New Open Channel Products

Posted on February 25, 2013 by

This week marked a big event for SEVEN Networks as we extended our Open Channel® offering from a single product that addresses mobile app signalling to an entire software product line delivering end-to-end visibility, management, and optimization of wireless traffic.

Here are the new software products added to the Open Channel product family (read the press release to get more detail on each of these):

  • Open Channel Policy Enforcement – Enforces policies to manage mobile traffic and enable service plan creation.
  • Open Channel Seamless Mobility – Delivers seamless mobility when devices move between carrier networks and Wi-Fi.
  • Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE – Optimizes Wi-Fi offloading decisions to improve end-user experience.

To support this announcement, we’ve been on a media tour, talking with leading wireless industry journalists and analysts and getting them excited about what the new Open Channel software products can do.

Our core message is that carriers need to regain control over mobile app data traffic and need a solution that does a better job of optimizing and managing this traffic. This is one statement on which we had universal agreement.

What caught the attention of the analysts and media was that Open Channel’s client/server architecture extends control to the mobile device itself so that traffic can be managed before impacting the network. This conserves network resources much more effectively than solutions that work only from the network side.

Another point of discussion was the ability of Open Channel Policy Enforcement to open up new service plan options, such as an email-only data plan. The software is context-aware, detecting many device states such as idle time, active use status, radio connected state or time of day.  These context-aware capabilities provide great flexibility to carriers in defining and enforcing policies.

A couple of other significant elements of the new Open Channel are the two software components that help make real the promise of using Wi-Fi to offload data traffic. This is something carriers strongly desire, but enabling it without impacting the customer is tricky.  For example, a customer watching a streaming video while transitioning from a cell network to Wi-Fi will lose that stream and have to reconnect to the server to restart the video.

The Open Channel Seamless Mobility product ensures continuous service delivery for mobile apps during these transitions for a high quality end-user experience.  The Open Channel Wi-Fi QoE (Quality of Experience) product optimizes decisions about when and where to offload, taking into consideration network quality factors before switching from cellular to Wi-Fi.

We concluded our meetings by emphasizing that these Open Channel software products are designed to help carriers take back control of app data traffic while improving the customer experience for subscribers. The response to the new Open Channel products, and the product line as a whole, was very positive and we will share more details about the product in future blog posts.

Posted in Open Channel, SEVEN News | Leave a comment

2013: New Year, New Mobile App Troubles

Posted on February 15, 2013 by

The New Year is still young, but carriers are facing the same old problems from mobile app data that rose to a critical level in 2012. Here’s a round-up of several recent news events that shows that the need for better traffic optimization is growing.

A lot more data: The Cisco Systems Visual Networking Index is one of the most widely quoted mobile traffic reports in the industry.  Now, the company has updated its predictions, with the stark news that by 2017, global mobile data traffic will jump by 13 times to 11.2 exabytes consumed globally per month.  That’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 66% over a five-year period. Cisco believes that a combination of more connected devices – growing from 7 billion to 10 billion by 2017 – and increased usage (“soon every network experience will become a mobile experience”) are the driving forces.

What one app can do to a network: How much of an impact can one app have on a carrier’s network?  As we’ve discussed in a previous blog post about Angry Birds, one app can bring a network to its knees.  The new Facebook app is not that bad, but a recent study by Alcatel-Lucent shows that the November 2012 update of the Facebook app for iOS and Android drove a “dramatic increase of almost 60 percent in the signaling load and 25 percent in the airtime consumed by the Facebook application.” During that time the user base of Facebook Mobile only increase by 4 percent, meaning that the rest of the increase must be from the new design.

Carriers start to rank apps:  Customers turn to user and expert reviews to find out about new apps, but will they turn to a carrier review to know what impact that app will have on their battery life and data plan?  Verizon is hoping so.  The carrier has begun to rank iOS and Android apps on security, battery consumption, user experience and data usage.  For example, the company calls games like Fruit Ninja Free and Draw Something “high risk” apps due to their impact on battery drain, even though they are very popular overall. Facebook Messenger and eBay get bad marks for their persistent data connections, which transmit megabytes of overhead data that can chew through a data plan.

The growing impact of mobile data is causing carriers and others to take notice. It’s why mobile traffic optimization and management solutions like those in our Open Channel product family are continuing to get so much attention from carriers.

Posted in Industry Trends, Network Congestion | Leave a comment

Mobile App Free for all Not Great for Wireless Networks: Traffic Management Even More Critical

Posted on November 15, 2012 by

According to a recent article in PCWorld, leading analyst firm Gartner has reported “93 percent of all mobile apps will be free by 2016.”

This news will likely lead mobile app developers to focus their attention on how to drive revenue out of these free apps. This can be done either through in-app advertising or by making the app free, but charging the user for added features. While these tactics help the developer drive revenue, it only makes network congestion worse with constant signaling from the app to the app stores and/or advertiser websites.

Furthermore, the increased focus on revenue will distract the developers from focusing on improving the signaling and data transfer efficiency of their apps, much like we discussed in our recent blog post on HTML5 and developer priorities.

So, while consumers will certainly enjoy a greater selection of free apps, they will be hard pressed to enjoy using the apps due to increased traffic on the wireless network. We expect that this will only increase pressure on carriers to deploy traffic management solutions that enable them to maintain their good level quality of experience.

Posted in Network Congestion | Leave a comment

Network Signaling Overload and Congestion Becoming a Worldwide Phenomenon

Posted on November 13, 2012 by

We often talk about wireless network congestion in major countries, but smaller countries are feeling the wrath of the signaling storm as well. Last month, FierceBroadbandWireless shared a study from Cisco that projected “mobile network traffic in Mexico is expected to increase 23-fold from 2011 to 2016.”

Furthermore, the study found that “more than 70 percent of mobile users consider Wi-Fi faster and more cost-efficient than any other type of access; about 60 percent believe Wi-Fi is more reliable and offers optimal performance for their applications.”

It is great that Internet users in Mexico have taken an interest in connecting via WiFi. This will certainly help the congestion of local wireless networks, but as we reported in this blog post, WiFi alone will not enough to combat the signaling storm. App developers will need to create apps that are more efficient and carriers will need to implement tools that can help optimize the network.

Fore more information on how we think carriers can optimize the wireless network, visit http://www.seven.com/products.traffic_optimization.php.

Posted in Network Congestion | Leave a comment

As Android Goes, So Goes the Network

Posted on November 9, 2012 by

The market growth in smartphones that has brought us the wireless data tsunami is showing no signs of slowing, according to Q2 2012 handset shipment numbers from IDC.  Android’s growing lead in the market, though, has some implications for wireless network capacity, whether it’s bandwidth or signaling.

In IDC’s latest report, the analyst firm estimated that 154 million smartphones shipped during Q2 of 2012.  Of that, about 68% ran Android and 17% ran iOS.  BlackBerry came in a distant third at 4.8% market share and the rest of the market was a combination of Windows Phone/Windows Mobile, Symbian, Bada and others.

In terms of market share growth, Android posted a 106% growth from the prior year – an amazing feat.

The key takeaways for the network are: 1) more phones equal more app usage and an increased risk of congestion; 2) and the new dominance of Android might also impact the network.  In terms of signaling and data efficiency BlackBerry and iOS are somewhat better than Android.

So with Android ascending, there will be more traffic per handset just from the OS.  Of course, the bulk of the traffic is from apps and no handset maker yet has standards of efficiency on that front.

More traffic management and traffic optimization with a special focus on Android OS is the way to neutralize the network impact of the growth of these handsets.

Posted in Mobile Devices, Network Congestion | Leave a comment