Yesterday, Sandvine announced a video optimization implementation together with Mobixell at a new US customer, nTelos Wireless. Beyond the story of a new customer and the partnership between Mobixell and Sandvine, there lies another, more global story.

There’s no secret that the video optimization market is evolving. Needs are changing as operators adjust their vision of the future. While most optimization sales until now have been about cost savings or traffic volume control, mobile operators are talking more about what the next major source of revenue will be.

One thing is for sure: Video optimization will play a part in the future of winning mobile operators, regardless of whether they are looking only to reduce their bottom line or to add new services that can complement, and perhaps someday eclipse basic data sales.

As Don Bowman, Sandvine CTO, pointed out in a recent blog post, not all video optimization solutions are alike. And that’s an important fact for operators to remember as they consider future business planning. If an operator is looking to simply cut costs with optimization, then they can achieve that goal with one of the advanced optimization solutions available today.

But down the road, the winners among mobile operators will be those who are brave enough to accept that straight data revenue will eventually flatten out, (as did messaging and voice before it), and that they need to embrace new network monetization models to ensure a profitable future. Whatever those monetization models will be, they start with a network that can handle data intensive services – optimized networks.

Operators are starting to take baby steps – Mobixell customers are using policy management to offer targeted services, including video optimization; they are already generating millions of advertising dollars with our platform; and they are showing growing interest in the potential that mobile customer engagement tools hold for the future of their service strategies.

Eventually, some brave operator will step forward and do something crazy – perhaps set up a policy to buy and sell premium content for their subscribers, similar to the cable TV model. Whatever that crazy step into the future of mobile mega revenue, it will rely on optimized video. This vision of the future is not just a dream: It has to happen for operators to move past the commodity data model. It is what is driving our product goals today so that we can offer operators easy-to-use tools for generating new revenues. This is only a peek into the future with video optimization as a prerequisite for network monetization.

Tell us what you think.

We’ll be discussing this and related issues in an upcoming webinar on May 30th together with Teresa Cottam of Telesperience titled ‘What Video Optimization Experts Are Not Telling you‘. More in our next post.

What a response!

The press release that we published yesterday with Commtouch proved one thing for sure: Content filtering sells. Then again, maybe it was the headline:

Protecting Children from Mobile Porn Gets Push from National Governments

The irony, of course, is that we and Commtouch are trying to help mobile operators comply with child protection legislation and people seem to be more interested in porn than in content filtering. I suppose that should not be too surprising. But it does underscore the issue: Porn is big business. But, for better or worse, it’s still going to be big enough even if parents can protect their children from it with the help of their mobile network operators.

Quick Summary
Governments, including the UK, Ireland and Australia are debating the merits of requiring mobile subscribers to opt-in if they want to be able to receive certain content categorized as unsuitable for children.

Constantly changing content, new sites and user-generated sites with a mix of family-friendly and inappropriate content pose a challenge to operators who will be required to enable the regulation of specified content.

Mobixell Seamless Access Mobile Internet Gateway, using Commtouch GlobalView™ URL Filtering content categorization, enables telecom operators to manage complex content delivery policies, offering a variety of opt-in user protection services, including parental control, real-time rating and content verification.

For more information, check out the press release.

And for those of you celebrating, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Seth Greenberg
Director of Corporate Marketing
Mobixell

I know we’ve quoted Yogi Berra* in a previous post. But he’s just so quotable, isn’t he?

If you were thinking that the coming  storm, predicted to flood mobile networks with streaming video, will make mobile data optimization too costly to implement down the road, think again. Today, Mobixell announced Mobixell EVO™. Mobixell EVO is an entirely new approach to mobile optimization which discourages mobile operators from optimizing overall data volume and, instead, focus on optimizing congestion in the network. Why? Good question.

We’ve been talking with our mobile operator customers, analysts and other industry experts for the last few months and they’ve been telling us how their projections for mobile infrastructure investment is going to outstrip data revenue in the  next few years. They’re telling us that data optimization is not going to make the situation any better. Until now, their optimization solutions expand incrementally as data volume grows. So our CTO office sat down and figured out a way to keep both infrastructure investment down and the optimization hardware footprint limited. It sounds almost ridiculous until you consider that the way many network operators look at optimization is outdated (or, it will be soon).

When data optimization is applied to reduce overall volume, there is little impact on Quality of Experience (QoE) in congested networks. But when optimization focuses only on congestion, predicting near-congestion before it occurs, not only does it require far less in hardware resources since it ignores traffic that doesn’t affect QoE. It also puts end users at the center of the solution – lower congestion means better video streaming and a browsing experience. Add to that an open, cloud-based architecture to call on hardware resources only when they are required and you’ve got Mobixell EVO.

Now, Mobixell EVO is, for the most part, just a framework at this point – a set of principles that are guiding R&D into the future. Mobixell Seamless Access already includes elements of the Evolved Optimization approach – DBRA, for example – and we are planning announcements in 2012 of more features conceived through this new approach. Same industry-leading Seamless Access platform. But now an even better bet for the future when mobile video hits levels that could otherwise get out of hand.

Check out today’s press release or download the new Mobixell EVO White Paper for more information.

We look forward to optimizing your network long into your future. Yes. There is a future for optimization and mobile broadband, thanks to Mobixell EVO. Whew.

*Again, if you are not familiar with American Baseball legends, or with Yogi Berra quotes in particular, check him out on Wikipedia for a few sparkling examples. He is a genius of accidentally brilliant quotes.

I’m not an iPhone or iPad user. It’s not as though I don’t love the design and the features. Samsung has done a bang up job with design. I will admit, though, that sometimes I get iPad envy at meetings. But I’ve been very happy with my Android phone for both work and play.

Then, something happened a couple of weeks and I realized I’d made the right choice (at least for now). I was meeting with someone about a position at Mobixell and she wanted to show me something on our website, mobixell.com. She pulled out her iPhone 4 and browsed to the site. Then she stopped on the home page and told me how weird it was that there was this great big white patch in the design at the top of the page. After my double-take, I realized what the problem was. I explained that the site was fine but that her iPhone was ignoring the Flash animation at the top of the page.

I browsed to the site on my Samsung Galaxy and showed her how it was supposed to look.

That experience was frustrating on several levels. First of all, it hadn’t occurred to me that there are elements of our own website that are affected by the Apple iOS restriction on Adobe Flash technology. (With 200 million devices running Apple iOS, that’s a lot of frustration.) She was frustrated that her really really cool iPhone didn’t perform and she didn’t know whether to blame the site, the phone or her network. From the Mobixell point of view, it seemed crazy that there was no way to get her iPhone to play the animation without paying for an app or some other workaround.

It was, however, an opportunity to practice my pitch about a new feature in Mobixell Seamless Access that we were about to announce which gives mobile operators the opportunity to deliver Adobe Flash video content on all iOS devices. I explained that the Flash animation would also be supported in an upcoming version. She expressed her hope that her operator would install Seamless Access. So, it wasn’t all frustrating (at least for me).

We’re going to be updating that banner on our site soon. Adobe Flash is the perfect tool for designging what we want. But as a marketer, I’m still concerned about all those iPhone and iPad users whose operators aren’t using Seamless Access yet. At least I have my Android phone.

(BTW, click here if you want want to watch a short video about Flash content on iOS with Seamless Access. And here’s a link to an announcement that went out yesterday.)

Seth Greenberg
Director, Corporate Marketing
Mobixell

I hope everybody has recovered from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Unfortunately, I got sick on th 3rd day of the show and missed out on seeing some of the more interesting new products, for example the 3D phone that was introduced by LG.  Luckily, I can rely on industry bloggers like Ewan MacLeod whose posts includes videos like the tour of the RIM stand which I saw from my hotel room.  Because I was sick, I missed an interview with Ewan that I was looking forward to–we’ll catch you next time, Ewan.

Moving on, we are gearing up for our User Conference in Italy in April .  I’ll be posting more information about that event next time.

Cheers,

Noam, VP Marketing, Mobixell

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.

Click here to read the rest of the article on radio-electronics.com

Cisco’s comprehensive annual Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, released Feb 1st, introduces some very interesting statistics about the mobile network in the coming years.

The year of 2010 ended with an unexpected growth in global mobile traffic data. For a third year in a raw global mobile data traffic has nearly tripled during 2010.

Mobile phones seem to develop and evolve at an exponential rate. Throughout 2010 the number of smartphones in use grew by 32 percent. Along with mobile-connected laptops, an evolving market of tablets and migration of traffic from the fixed network, overall mobile data usage is expected to grow up to 6.3 exabytes per month by 2015.

The report lays out the 9 major trends considered to be the reasons for mobile traffic growth in the near future. One of these trends, having the highest growth rate of any application category measured within the Cisco VNI forecast - Mobile Video – was also identified by Mobixell and is addressed by its Seamless Access Video Optimization solution.

Compared to other mobile contents, video content is richer, more complex and has much higher bit rates. Mobile video traffic is expected to pass the 50 percent bar in 2011 to reach 52.8 percent of traffic by the end of the year.

Furthermore, Cisco anticipates that mobile video will generate much of the mobile traffic growth through 2015, populating 4.2 exabytes of data crossing the mobile network.

A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 terabytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB. The prefix peta- (P) indicates a power of 1000:

-  1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 1000⁵ B = 10¹⁵ B.  If you really want to know more check out this Wikipedia article.

We announced today that Mobxiell has reached the milestone of optimizing one petabyte of mobile video traffic every month. One petabyte is one billion megabytes of data, roughly equivalent to 350,000,000 minutes of YouTube videos.

Our milestone was reached thanks to the global growth in mobile video consumption, as well as the company’s recent deployments of its video optimization and web acceleration capabilities in Tier 1 operators in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Given the current rate of growth, and additional sites being launched, We predict that our existing customer base will reach the five petabyte per month barrier by the end of 2011.

The continued growth of mass market smartphones means that more and more users are creating and accessing video content, placing more and more stress on the operator networks. YouTube is still the biggest source for mobile video consumption, yet the rise of other video-rich websites and mobile applications is also having a big impact.  The volume of mobile video traffic is already reaching over 55% of our operator’s HTTP traffic and is continuously growing. Mobile video traffic is predicted to reach more than 70% of all mobile traffic, which means every operator, large and small, should be exploring creative ways to reduce that volume of traffic, as part of a wider traffic optimization strategy in 2011.

We asked Declan Lonergan, vice president of Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer research group what he thought of this phenomenon: “The growth of mobile video has outpaced every other form of mobile data on the operator network. It is such a large, and growing source of bandwidth usage, that failing to address it can have a significant, negative impact on a carrier’s operating expenditure, potentially going so far as to put the economics of running a network at risk.”

With real-time entertainment commanding up to 43% of total Internet traffic, as discussed in Sandvine’s recent Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena report, many mobile operators are experiencing high network load and thus are looking for end to end media optimization solutions.   Sandvine today announced it has partnered with Mobixell and 2 other global companies for end-to-end media optimization solutions. The combination of Sandvine’s unique divert technology and Mobixell’s “Seamless Access”, an advanced Mobile Internet Gateway solution, enables us to provide a continuous non-stop video playing experience regardless of network fluctuations.  Smooth and continuous video experience is one of users’ strongest indicators of network quality – and ultimately influences the perception of their operator’s network efficiency.

IBM has announced the initiation of a new telecom solution lab in Israel. The lab in Israel is one of the 8 IBM telecom solutions labs around the world, which operate in the United States, France, China, Japan, India, South Africa, Brazil and Malaysia. Similar solutions labs are expected to be opened in other countries in the future.

The new lab is based on IBM’s cloud computing platform, and is meant to demo new and advanced technologies between IBM and its technology partners. Mobixell has been chosen to demonstrate its Seamless Access Platform to show case data traffic and optimization solutions.

IBM’s unique cloud computing approach allows rapid establishment of sampling systems for IBM sales professionals around the world, each of whom benefits from a dedicated sampling environment. The lab is also based on IBM’s telecom management platform and services delivery, known as SPDE – Service Provider Delivery Platform. This platform already provides services for global telecom services giants such as Bharti in India and Maxis in Malaysia.