Bytemobile expands mobile platform by 50%
The Santa Clara, CA-based Bytemobile, which offers its SmartCapacity solutions for mobile network operators, has increased 
capacity of its Unison platform by 50 percent, in response to “the explosive demand for mobile video from millions of new 3G and 4G subscribers.” The expansion is in direct response to what the company calls “the explosive demand for mobile video from millions of new 3G and 4G subscribers worldwide.” Features in the new Unison 6.0 includes streaming policy control for all major audio and video services including maintaining rights for Digital Rights Management (DRM) content; High-Definition (HD) optimization; and video caching with adaptive optimization to balance network performance across viral and long-tail video content.
Over the past ten years, Bytemobile Smart Capacity solutions have been deployed with more than 125 operators in 60 countries, including 8 of the world’s top 10 tier-one carriers. MobilizedTV spoke with Bytemobile vp of global marketing Ronny Haraldsvik about the news. Haraldsvik started off by reiterating Bytemobile’s recent analysis of data trends: video-based content on mobile devices is expected to grow by 50 percent in 2011, accounting for more than 60 percent of network traffic. Next-generation smartphones will dominate with regard to consumption of streaming media and HD video content. All of this is within the context of the continuing roll-out of LTE services by several network operators.
“Video is something that’s become intertwined in our daily lives,” says Haraldsvik. “Take a look at Netflix and how they’re pushing out streaming content and HD video. If you’re a fixed wireline provider, you have a problem, but there are huge issues with wireless. You’re promising something the network isn’t necessarily able to do…and you can’t stop people from doing it. “Operators are under the gun,” he continues. ” CAPEX [capital expenditure] is an enormous strain on the budget. Operators are forced to find various ways and means to fix the capacity problem, which has shone a light on the need for optimization in the network. It’s gone from optimization being nice to have to critical.”
Just as digital cameras never provide enough resolution to please film-centric cinematographers, there will never be enough spectrum to meet the demand. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that people will consume whatever you give them,” he says. “An average Clearwire subscriber consumes 7 GB. Some consume 17 GB. We talked to someone who consumes 55 GB. It’s moving away from the megabyte era to the gigabyte and soon terabytes, when it comes to how people refer to content. The toothpaste is out of the tube.”
Bytemobile’s optimization solutions are aimed to improve this problem. “The bigger the bandwidth available to the subscriber, the more we save for them,” says Haraldsvik. “As the pipe gets bigger, our optimization benefits increase dramatically. We expect optinization will free up data capacity by 60 percent for LTE networks.” Then there’s the metrics side of what Bytemobile offers. “We can see every bit and byte coming through, see what device is consuming it, what kind of content it’s consuming, and when,” says Haraldsvik. “The operator can be flagged if we come across a crunch in the network, or a new app is consuming an excessive amount of data. For the most part, operators don’t truly know what’s going on in the network, but they definitely want to know, which is why metrics is crucial. ”
As an example of this massive flow of data, Haraldsvik pointed to the Bytemobile reseller relationship with IBM. FIfteen of Bytemobile’s largest tier-one customers, which serve more than 350 million subscribers in North America, Europe and Asia, rely on IBM’s BladCenter network servers as well as the Unison Smart Capacity Platform “Approximately 13 petabytes (PB) of data traffic flow through these operators’ networks daily,” says Haraldvik. “That’s the data volume equivalent of 175 years of HD-TV video.” Bytemobile’s applications have also been certified to support IBM’s new Cloud Service Provider Platform, to help mobile operators deliver cloud computing on their own. Bytemobile integrates and markets the BladeCenter HT with its Unison Smart CapacityPlatform under an Industry Solutions Reseller relationship with IBM.
At Mobile World Congress, February 14-17 in Barcelona , the Unison Smart Capacity Platform will be on display in the IBM exhibit (Hall 1, 1C31) and in the Bytemobile exhibit (Hall 1, 1F05).
Tags: 4G subscribers, Bytemobile, DRM, LTE networks, mobile video, Mobile World Congress, MobilizedTV, Netflix, SmartCapacity
This entry was posted on Monday, February 7th, 2011 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Content, Devices, Monetizing Mobile.
