11 Feb 2011

Optimise Or Fail: The Network Aware Approach

Noam Green, Associate Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Mobixell looks at the optimisation considerations central to quickly adjusting to current and future network challenges.

With the data explosion in full progress wireless networks are now approaching full capacity, forcing mobile operators to significantly increase their investment in wireless infrastructure. This major segment of operator expenditure is projected to grow extensively over the coming years as mobile data consumption continues to mushroom.

In Europe consumers' mobile phone usage habits have changed dramatically, with mobile video expected to account for over 50 percent of network traffic by 2011[1] and other media rich applications demanding rapidly increasing levels of bandwidth. In developing countries mobile data growth will prove to be additionally challenging as the mobile is widely used as the only viable alternative to computers for web access.

The issue holds some very important implications for today's mobile users who are increasingly using their handsets as mini computers to perform a vast array of day to day activities which were once done via the home PC.

Operators across the globe are rightly concerned. For years they have marketed heavily for increased data usage having financed expensive 3G licenses, but their main concern now is over-use.

Increased take up of next-generation smartphones will encourage even further consumption of bandwidth-hungry content and network capacity is likely to be pushed to its limits even as operators migrate to the very expensive LTE technologies, which may fail to fully address the issue in the medium term.

In light of this mobile operators must now create new and innovative ways to optimise their networks to accommodate customer demands and ensure a robust platform for new services and revenue streams.

How we arrived here

Optimisation techniques have been used for many years within mobile networks to improve the user experience when using mobile data services. Arguably, the early WAP1 protocol was introduced to not only deal with the limited capabilities of early devices, but also to optimise the delivery of content over circuit switched data connections with limited bandwidth.

As society and working practices became more mobile and mobile phone usage became pervasive, the scope and demand to use mobile phones for data transfer grew. Consumers wanted to enhance their mobile experience with downloaded information from the Internet and by sending and receiving video content.

The introduction of 2.5G data cards was the first stage in accommodating medium speed data transfer capability. These enabled laptops to access the open Internet across the mobile network, providing the crucial catalyst for the introduction of web optimisation platforms into the mobile data network.

The initial role of web optimisation platforms was to provide an acceptable user experience by decreasing page load times. With the limited bandwidth of GPRS connectivity, reducing the volume of a page's content was the most effective way to reduce the time necessary to load individual pages. Several techniques were used to achieve this, including compressing text content and reducing image sizes, by using methods such as the QFactor reduction of JPEG images as an example.

A brute force, 'optimise all' approach was used at the time because bandwidth was always limited within GPRS networks. However, with the advent of the increasing speed and capacity of 3G mobile networks, many operators began to re-evaluate the costs and benefits of including web optimisation elements within their networks.

The cost and the promised performance of the new 3G and 3G+ networks meant that operators doubted that the additional cost of web optimisation would justify the potential gains. In the end, many decided against including optimisation elements in their networks. Armed with new third generation networks offering extensive data capacity, they also pushed their data offerings heavily to a consumer audience which at the time had very little need or demand for them.

Cellular networks today

Fast forward to today and the situation is markedly different. Experts failed to predict the sheer scale and pace of the increase in our demand for data. With rapid adoption of technologies such as the iPad and the growth of m-commerce, upcoming hardware, application and mobile service developments make it additionally difficult to predict what the future will bring. But one thing is certain - data usage is set to continue on its dramatic growth trajectory.

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