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Radical Simplicity: Moving Mountains for Personalized Services

Monday, January 16th, 2012 by Cam Cullen

Steve Jobs once said, “That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

There are three pillars to Intelligent Policy Enforcement: Awareness, Analysis, and Control. Solutions that lack any of these capabilities will limit the ability of an operator to deliver personalized services to their customers. The more they lack, the more limitations that will be imposed on the operator – whether those limits are scalability, performance, granularity, or even operational in nature.

Let’s be upfront about something: Personalized services are HARD.

Think of all the pieces that have to fall into place to deliver a personalized service.

1) A subscriber activates their device, and attempts to access the network. The network authenticates the subscriber and/or device to ensure that they are allowed access to the network.

2) Subscriber “service” must be determined and provisioned to the network. The service “attributes” may include bandwidth allowed, volume of data (either bulk or per service), priorities, security filters, value-added services, or even multi-device correlations. Depending on how the network is configured, this provisioning could be a single transaction to a single system, or many transactions to many systems (policy, charging, access, etc.). The subscriber and their data traffic must be associated with whatever “attributes” that are necessary to deliver their purchased service to their devices.

3) The systems that have been provisioned with the service “attributes” must enforce those attributes without causing instability of the systems or requiring additional CAPEX due to “unexpected” scalability issues.

4) The systems must perform network and business intelligence gathering on all traffic to feed the analytics systems for future service development. The more information that can be collected, the more valuable the data is for the operator. This data has to be collected with as small of an interval as possible, as the longer the interval the more you lose granularity (for example spikes in bandwidth and latency can be smoothed out over long intervals)

5) If volume/event-based charging or CDR/UDR generation is required, every charging event can result in a transaction with the charging infrastructure, and especially at session closing time.

6) In a network where phones go into an “idle” mode or where subscriber movement between locations is tracked, every time this happens can result in more transactions.

And the more services you offer, the harder it gets…

With the announcement of our PL20000 today, we believe that we have delivered the final piece of the puzzle for an ecosystem that will enable the largest network operators in the world to compete on an even keel with smaller, more agile network operators. The limitations faced by large operators are focused on scalability and complexity. Scalability is now a moot point, as the PL20000 can meet the needs of even the most stressful network deployments with the massive performance increase and the port density/support for 100GE interfaces.

The “Simplicity” part is harder (hence the title of the blog). We have been adding capabilities for the last few years to make service creation simpler for operators. Report Studio is a perfect example of this – operators can now ask questions of the network staff and the network team can use Report Studio to answer them based on the massive statistics repository available in the PacketLogic Intelligence Center (which handles an order of magnitude more statistics than other solutions). Our Virtual Services Capability enables operators to define their own services based on application properties (URLs, http referrers, content-type, device-types, file-type, etc.) without intervention by Procera or our signature development team. We have unmatched capability with our PacketLogic Subscriber Management system – in terms of performance (over 100,000 transactions per second), capacity (up to 20,000,000 subscribers in a single system), and ease-of-use (customizable service dictionaries, easy to use interface, interfaces to multiple policy and charging systems simultaneously).

We believe that we are driving solutions towards the nirvana of ‘Radical Simplicity” where carrier-grade IPE solutions do not have to be managed by acolytes of technology that speak arcane languages (ok, maybe program arcane languages). The combination of performance, scalability, and ease-of-use will take Intelligent Policy Enforcement to mass-market deployments for operators of all sizes. Operators that are forced to wait 9 months for a service launch to capitalize on a new trend will find that the trend is no longer hot. Operators that must plan for a performance or scalability reduction for every new service that they launch will very quickly find their solutions very capital intensive and inefficient.

Simplicity is hard. We want to help you move mountains, so we are working smarter (as well as harder!).

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The End of the Internet as we know it: Streaming Live – the Super Bowl!

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 by Cam Cullen

Yesterday, the NFL announced that it would be streaming the Super Bowl live to iPads, Verizon mobile phones and the NBC/NFL websites. In my mind, this marks a significant moment in the annals of streaming video as the potential turning point in the transition from traditional delayed broadcast video to live streaming. Sure, there have been plenty of live streams across the Internet (and not just pirated streams of sports events!). In fact, the NFL streams games every week and the past two Olympics have been streamed online. The NFL claims that 20,000-30,000 viewers watch their regular Sunday night streams, compared to 21,000,000 viewers of the broadcast version. However, the Super Bowl was watched by 111,000,000 viewers last year. NBC has upped the ante by promising excusive content and analysis for the streaming version, which is likely to result in people having both the streaming and broadcast versions active in their household at the same time – the big consumer most likely will be the iPad version.

 Why is this significant for the Internet? 

1)   The NFL and NBC have confidence in their ability to stream content to millions of simultaneous consumers around the world. Although the NFL is not a worldwide sport like soccer (football to the rest of the world!), people watch the Super Bowl worldwide. If this goes well, expect the World Cup final to get the same treatment in 2014.

2)   Broadband networks are expected to be able to handle the streaming load (To Be Determined!) across millions of subscribers. I expect broadband operators to be scrambling to ensure that their peering links with the CDN for this event is up to the task.

3)   The CDN delivering the live streaming is confident that it is up to the task for a live event. This is not a case where you can pre-position content to meet the expected demand.

4)   Latency issues between the live telecast and the streaming event are expected to be minimal. This one is interesting to me as I have seen many cases where a score is reported via Twitter before it happens on my TV screen – for many sports.

If this event succeeds and the NFL is able to claim that they are the first to stream such a significant event live, it will start a rush towards content owners for live events to monetize their properties. It will also potentially signal an aggravation of the problem for broadband operators, as it will give new meaning to “peak” hours.  Peak will now be whenever the event occurs – and not during the standard peak hour times. Some broadband networks will struggle with network congestion in this scenario, so it will be interesting to see which operators can deliver high-quality streams during this event.

Here at Procera, we have been seeing stress building on the Intelligent Policy Enforcement infrastructure; live video streaming will add a new dimension to it. In addition to the bandwidth stress, I would expect to see services pop up in this area – like zero-rated streaming, priority streaming (for a fee) – all of which will not only stress the infrastructure, but also the management and OSS layer for policy management and charging. With live events, this will be an even more acute problem for PCRF/PCEF/OCS/OFCS systems, as the sessions will start within a very short time, creating almost a “network outage”-type flood on the network.

We will be watching this event very closely. Stay tuned for our report after the event.

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“Do you want Facebook with that?”: The Challenges of Personalized Charging

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 by Cam Cullen

The challenges of personalized charging or charging based on applications have generated a lot of discussion lately.  The key challenge in any type of service like this is the proper setting of expectations with the customer. There have been a few examples to date of mobile operators attempting to offer prioritized services (mainly gaming) or “enablement” services (i.e., Pay $5 and we will let you use Skype on our mobile broadband.), but application or even site-based charging will require even more techniques. Many GGSNs in the past have offered limited zero-rating capabilities for ringtone downloads, system updates, etc., based on IP addresses or a small number of URLs. There are many cases of IPE systems being used for charging today; however, many of them are volume- or time-based charging to offload existing charging systems, or were installed for future application-based charging use cases.

On the other hand, “application-based” charging or even “site-based” charging in today’s Internet environment brings all new challenges to the table. The biggest challenge is that the user experience on a site is very different than it used to be. Facebook, for example, is now also a container for YouTube videos, ads, games, and chat. YouTube can serve up videos in formats other than flash video for Apple devices.  To determine this the operator needs to understand the user experience, and will need to use tools from an IPE to ensure that the user experience is matched through the proper application of signatures, policies, and charging models.

Operators looking to offer new charging models need tools to ensure that the service that they offer matches the user expectations for a site. Operators need the ability to look at a customer’s connectivity in real-time to troubleshoot billing discrepancies, much less to test service ideas in their labs. They need systems that can use properties of applications or sites – for example, the ability to key off the referrer field in http. They need to be able to log user connections to specific sites to have forensic details for value-based or zero-rated charging. They need quickly updated signatures when new versions of applications come out, and the ability to retroactively zero-rate traffic (unknown or incorrectly identified) if a signature changes and is identified as incorrect.

Beyond the features required, another huge challenge for personalized charging looms – signaling load. This is potentially the biggest scaling challenge, and needs to be architected carefully from the beginning. When a user initially accesses the network, the network must be provisioned with the correct service plan for that user, which can require interaction between multiple systems for each service that the customer has purchased. If architected correctly, signaling load can be minimized, and only refreshed as necessary; but, this can also operate on an on-demand basis, which would cause transactions every time a new piece of content is accessed. The IPE, PCRF, and OCS/OFCS systems need to support tens of thousands of sessions per second in a mobile network of any size, and support for less than that will result in severe limitations for any operator that wants to offer mass market personalized charging plans. On the PCRF/OCS side, a new class of product (diameter routers) is designed to allow network signaling to scale. But, on the IPE front, the IPE solutions will need to scale independently, since they are doing both the heavy lifting for charging as well as the reporting.

Personalized charging is one of the most intriguing new services for broadband operators, but will require a system that can adapt rapidly to service changes and can be adjusted in real-time by the operator. It will need to scale on multiple fronts without losing performance or functionality, and certainly without losing accuracy – both for billing and for application identification.

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BBTM in London – The Buffet Is Closed!

Thursday, November 17th, 2011 by Jon Linden

I just got back from London and Informa’s third annual global Broadband Traffic Management (BBTM) conference, and guess what, the buffet is closed! Not the actual buffet at the conference, which in spite today’s state of the global economy, was bigger and tastier than ever – great job Royal Garden Hotel! No, I’m talking about the “all you can eat” broadband offering that used to be standard, that has become rare, and that was predicted dead in the coming year or two.

I love the crowded and intimate exhibition and networking area at BBTM where competitors and partners rub shoulders as they work hard to convince operator representatives about the uniqueness of their products. What I love even more, is when there’s an opportunity to debate hot topics with an audience.

So, I was full of expectation as I walked over to the Kensington Suite fifteen minutes ahead of the session to grab a seat at the podium. Soon I was joined by my fellow panelists from Mu (operator in UAE), Belgacom, Sandvine, Allot and Tekelec; and last but not least, our moderator for the day, Steven Hartley from Ovum.

The topic for the day was “Can Operators Manage the Transition Away From Unlimited Plans While Keeping Customers Happy?”, and the unanimous verdict was that unlimited “all you can eat” broadband offerings are doomed due to the disconnect between the income and the cost of producing them. But what will come in its place, and what are things to consider as operators head in this direction? Let me summarize my favorite parts of the panel discussion for those of you who didn’t have the opportunity to attend on-site:

  • The key is to package and communicate offers that are understandable. We’ve made bandwidth (speed) and volume (caps) industry standard for service tiers. Both of which are insanely bad – they’re introvert (cost-based), tech terms, and we can’t even guarantee a firm speed but a “best effort up to” number. And they’re not common knowledge since the majority of the population is not a computer engineer and familiar with gigabytes and gigabits – and they don’t understand the difference – which means that we must waste energy educating them. And we, the specialists, can’t even answer the most basic question, “what can I do with 5 Mbps that I can’t do with 2?”
  • Instead you should sell value-based offers. The difference in tiers should present a clear value to the customer. By making the benefits understandable and measurable, you manage expectation – and disappointment is always a question of expectation.
  • For example, if you use Facebook 90% of the time, you will be a happy customer if you have a perceived good user-experience when using Facebook, i.e. 90% of the time you use the service. And you will not have high expectations for the other 10% since that’s not what you primarily pay for. You might even be happily surprised just by the fact that it works. User experience is not a question of size, or speed in this case, just like restaurants don’t promote the size of the meal on the á la carte menu.
  • 3UK, who offer an unlimited data plan, attended the session from row one. I love what 3UK do because it’s extremely easy to understand – unlimited data traffic on your smartphone. As a consumer I find this very appealing. Anyone can understand this. But it’s an example of an “unlimited with restrictions” since it’s tied to one specific device.
  • This is also a good example of the constant change operators must embrace. The border between smartphones and computers will disappear, and the smartphone will be as bandwidth consuming as a laptop. By then the package must be redefined. But that’s fine. You will not package the eternal service package anymore since there are variables you can’t control. The “youth package” might push Facebook today, Spotify six months from now, and an application not yet developed in a year.
  • This makes the soft values like customer loyalty and a strong brand extremely crucial. You must create an Apple-like experience and relationship with your customers. The customers are probably Apple’s best sales team, and they associated themselves so much with the product that it becomes a lifestyle. In the broadband world this would be a service that the customer perceives as “good for his purposes”, at the right price, and he’ll actively argue for why he picked this service when talking to his friends.
  • Another Apple (for Apple) comparison is their ability to sell customers more and more Apple products – iPhone, MacBook, iPad and an AppleTV – that are interconnected. This is how you should sell services to your customers. And it’s also applicable to these specific Apple products since consumers don’t want an individual plan for each of the four, five IP-based devices they carry around. The plan might even extend itself to a group – a family, a company or a soccer team.

Even though we as consumers consider restriction to unlimited as something bad, I think that we all understand that there must be an underlying business rational. The quality of the buffet is rarely as good as the á la carte, or we would eat at the buffet all the time. As we change to accommodate today’s conditions, we might as well adjust so that it becomes understandable – even for laymen – and measurable so it can meet our expectations.

Time for lunch. The buffet is served. Enjoy it while you can!

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SCTE 2011: “Wow this stuff is Powerful”

Thursday, November 17th, 2011 by John DeLangie

As I get ready to leave SCTE 2011 in Atlanta, I am struck by the diverse collection of vendors ranging from custom tools, outside plant equipment companies and RF video enablement to IP video, high-speed IP transport vendors and Intelligent Policy Enforcement all focused on providing products and services to the Cable industry.

This years SCTE Expo Technology Spotlight “is focused on next generation video architecture and associated technologies that will be required and the challenges of adapting content from increasingly more diverse sources to increasingly more diverse devices, many of which are untethered.”  Sound familiar?  As the explosive demand for online content and the mobile device adoption continues at a record pace the need for high performance and scalable Intelligent Policy Enforcement solutions that provide accurate business analytics continues to expand.

The recent launch of Procera’s game changing PacketLogic Report Studio has been met with excitement and interest from current customers as well as prospects and even some competitors who have flocked to the booth to see the PacketLogic solution demo and the PacketLogic Report Studio’s powerful reports first hand.  It’s been an action packed few days filled with customer meetings and compelling product demos.  I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the words “Wow this stuff is powerful”.

The PacketLogic Report Studio Business-ready Analytics solution enhances business intelligence analytics with custom visualizations making it easy to move from data to insight to action, and to provide all key stakeholders with the actionable information they need. It provides a holistic view of customer experience in a format that can be read and comprehended seamlessly as well as performs predictive intelligence analysis.   Report Studio can help MSOs understand the impacts OTT video, social media networking, online gaming, network congestion as well as device usage.

As we are wrapping up another successful conference and Expo you can be sure to see Procera at next year’s conference and many more as our continuing commitment to the Cable market is as strong as ever.

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Another Great Year at the Educuase Conference!

Friday, October 21st, 2011 by Trevor Failor

The Procera booth was humming with activity as video streaming, device proliferation, and VoD are driving schools to seek more scalable and intelligent tools for managing the increasing bandwidth demands from students and faculty.

My days were booked with customer meetings and it quickly became apparent that our Smart Campus suite’s unique capability to integrate with NAC devices such as Impulse Point, Cisco Clean Access, and Bradford Networks was one of the key points that everyone was impressed with.

There was a very positive buzz at the show and when all is said and done, I keep coming back to four key areas that customers were very interested in:

Device-aggregated Consumption Quotas ­- innovative schools such as University of Dayton are using Procera’s Smart Campus feature to roll up bandwidth consumption over multiple devices associated with a single student and apply a rolling time-based quota that dynamically moves abusers into a “penalty box” where they experience reduced bandwidth.

Enhanced Bandwidth Services -­ schools such as Miami University are rolling out a “Turbo Service”  that enables students with heavy-bandwidth requirements, such as Netflix customer and gamers, to purchase additional bandwidth for a fee.

Enhanced Video Services in the Classroom –  professors are increasingly using YouTube in their curriculum, and with Smart Campus’ ability to layer location, application, and user role-specific policies, it allow schools to guarantee that professors have optimal QoE for video in the classroom.

HEOA & DMCA Compliance ­- only Procera has the ability to proactive notify students of potential usage violations before an infraction takes place, thus educating students and preventing take-down notices from occurring in the first place.     Smart Campus’ ability to track network usage by User ID, not just IP address, shortens the reconciliation process when infractions do occur, also reducing overhead on the networking team.

Now I’m back and have to do my expense report,  but I am looking forward to following up with the attendees and adding many new schools to the rapidly growing PacketLogic community!!!

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Procera Accelerates Growth in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 by James Brear

I am proud to have Procera’s growth acknowledged for the second year in a row, by Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 as one of the top growth networking companies in North America. It is always good to have your success acknowledged, and Procera grew 962 percent during the 2011 survey period. I attribute our phenomenal growth to two main factors.

The first is the people that work at Procera.  This team is the best that I have ever worked with in my career, and they are dedicated to our customers like no other team that I have had the honor to work with. The engineering team is always innovating with our products, both at making our system work better as well as creating new products and technologies that have been extremely well received by the market. Our field teams are competing against companies that are bigger than Procera, and still managing to win large Tier 1 deployments, and even more telling, receiving follow-on orders that deepen the strategic relationship we have with our customers.

The second factor is the strength of our core technology. The same team that is with Procera today created our core technology, and they continually innovate our product without sacrificing the system architecture. Many products discover that they have fundamental flaws in their architecture as customer deployments grow, based on new feature demands or new services, but our PacketLogic solutions just get stronger.  We are able to create, launch, and deploy new products consistently faster than our competition, and can utilize the latest CPU architectures without significant effort.

I am very proud of the progress that Procera has made, and look forward to continuing to delight our customers as we grow.

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Steve Job’s Far Reaching Impact

Thursday, October 6th, 2011 by Cam Cullen

The tech industry suffered a great loss yesterday with the passing of Steve Jobs. There have been many articles written on the topic, all of which do a much better job than I can, but his contribution to the technology industry cannot be underestimated. He changed the game in so many industries, and the current boom in mobile devices and tablets can be credited to the work he led at Apple.

It is a fitting tribute that over the past 24 hours, a survey that Procera did on one of our North America broadband customers revealed that approximately 1% of the overall traffic on these networks were to URLs with “Steve Jobs” in the title. Although this is not a comprehensive capture of all Steve Jobs traffic (as it only captures URLs with Steve Jobs in the title), it is still a testament to the man and his influence in US culture today.

One customer graph is shown below for ~200k subscribers with a peak traffic of 20Gbps during this same time period:

Of the above traffic, the main CDNs and content sites were:

CDN/Site Traffic Total Notes:
Akamaihd.net 9.6 GB Obviously hosting HD videos for many content sites
Turner.com 4.2 GB CNN had a very nice video that was delivered from turner.com’s CDN
NY Times.com .6 GB
Cnet.com .6 GB
Facebook CDN.net .3 GB An interesting addition to the list, as this means that the URLS from facebook incorporated Steve Jobs in the URL

Steve Jobs, thank you for your contribution to the tech industry and we will miss you.

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Social Media Networking and Video Optimization – Show me the money!!!

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 by Hiran Thacker

What is the first thing you look out for when you wake up in the morning? Yes, it’s your smartphone or your tablet!!! I do too. To check Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ updates, any new photos or videos tagged on Facebook, and of course email (not necessarily in that order).  It’s a way of life to be connected 24×7 in real time checking stock quotes, sports scores, playing angry birds online or even who won the Oscars or who walked with whom on the red carpet when you are on the road or getting bored in a meeting.  All made possible because of your smart devices. Well all that is passé, with real time video streaming, you can even catch up on your favorite TV shows, movies, real time world events and news streaming whichever part of the world you are in.

Social media networking has fired up Internet traffic as well as viewership of content that, and that has already had a significant impact on Internet growth. U.S. Web surfers spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May 2011, according to Nielsen’s third-quarter report on the state of social media. Rich media has become a dominant form of content integrating social media networking (tagging of digital content like pictures and videos posted) with online video streaming driving video growth as well. By 2012 Online Video will capture over half of consumer Internet traffic. Online video streaming sites like Netflix (predominantly in North America, but spreading worldwide slowly), Hulu, YouTube, are extensively accessed globally for news, sporting events, entertainment, movies, television shows, home videos, etc. Explosion in data traffic due to early adoption of 4G/LTE and 3G in emerging markets globally adds to critical challenge of monitoring subscribers’ online video streaming which many a times causes unnecessary bandwidth consumption.

Content Monetization

Service providers, mobile network operators and universities face the unprecedented challenge of keeping up with the demand of increasing bandwidth usage required for high resolution content, but without the traffic contributing to any return on investment or new revenue streams. Currently, broadband operators do not receive any incremental revenue from the deluge of video streaming traffic, even though they are spending heavily to support the growth of that traffic, keeping Quality of Experience high, but attempting to keep operating expenses low.  Online streaming sites delivering television and movies are blamed for causing a decline in revenue to cable MSOs.

However, when online video QoE suffers, subscribers often look to their service providers to improve performance—even when the network isn’t to blame for degraded quality of experience.  How do the operators make money from OTT video apps???  One option is to generate new revenue streams based on quantifying the QoE per device, per network location, duration of video content accessed and implementation of adaptive bit rate technologies.  This will provide a new opportunity for operators to introduce tiered charging plans for applications accessed based on the Quality of Service promised and offer subscriber usage patterns to content providers and advertisers. According to a recent CIMI survey content monetization was earmarked as the top revenue generation priority for network operators globally in 2011.

Enhancing the User Experience

IPE technology analyzes the applications running over the broadband network, empowering the operator to offer optimized video content delivery as well as to increase the efficiency of the network resources. Video trans-rating and bit rate buffer throttling can then easily be implemented, both of which positively enhance the user experience without degrading the quality of the video stream, but delivering tremendous cost and bandwidth savings to the operator. Bit rate throttling for example, estimates the video content in the buffer of the device and enables sharing of bandwidth of concurrent video sessions more effectively, and ensures that if the user terminates the video prematurely, the buffered content is not wasted.

Procera’s Packetlogic Intelligent Policy Enforcement enables a rich array of policies for downloading and streaming video to be identified and enforced within the operator’s network, identify and manage different kinds of applications/protocols accessed using content awareness, ensuring optimal performance of the network for all subscribers as well as enhanced user experience created by real time network analytics and easy to use dashboards. The ability to manage bandwidth at a granular level, and a deep classification of real-time content, enables operators to provide application-based offload as well as create unique and differentiated services.

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Chasing the Dog’s Tail – The Challenge of Keeping up with Mobile Applications

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 by Cam Cullen

Mobile operators are constantly asking Procera how we keep up with application signatures. The rapidly evolving mobile application landscape is making signature updates even more critical, as new applications are launched at what seems like a mile a minute. Our R&D team sometimes feels like the proverbial dog chasing its tail, as every week there are tons of new mobile applications launched in the App Stores for the major mobile operating systems.

Mobile applications are the driving force in the new mobile data economy. Consumers do not have smartphones just for email anymore. Rather, they utilize them for social networking, video streaming, photo sharing and real-time search/navigation. A mobile operator looking to capitalize on the latest and greatest application craze wants to market its service to capitalize on these new “hip” applications. Early adopters in particular, present an opportunity for operators who take the lead on creatively marketing new services at zero cost or who offer reduced rates as part of a promotion.  A growing number of mobile operators are looking at how they can jump on this opportunity.  To do this successfully, they need to be quick off the mark with new applications.

The good news is that not all applications are created equal, and many are simply web front ends for a smartphone (sometimes just to get around the restrictions on in-app purchases by some App Stores). In these cases, a simple Virtual Service (which is a capability that we have for a customer to create their own signature) created to capture a specific type of traffic to a specific site will allow the mobile operator to create new services or zero-rate/exempt traffic from usage quotas in a matter of hours—not months as was the case in the past. The challenge is that many systems just classify these applications as HTTP, which does not allow for service differentiation, and an operator cannot create services based on these applications.

More complicated applications (messaging, VOIP and sometimes streaming video/audio), are another matter completely. Skype, Viber and Spotify are all examples of applications that can change the way they operate depending on the network bandwidth, attempts to limit their bandwidth or even the device on which they are running. These applications require a fast-moving development schedule, and sometimes cooperation between the operator and the vendor to ensure that traffic is properly classified. If you are charging (or NOT charging) based on a specific application, you better get it right!

For applications like this, we use a number of methods to keep our signatures up-to-date (some of which I won’t go into here in order to keep our secret sauces secret), but one of the critical capabilities that any mobile operator should be demanding of their vendor is keeping signatures up-to-date. A follow-up question is “How often do you update them?” An answer that has the word “month” or “with new firmware” should set off alarm bells. The mobile application landscape is moving way too fast for operators to be hobbled by slow signature updating. If you cannot get a new signature or launch a new service in a matter of weeks, you are not being served well.

Mobile operators that have the ability to innovate with new services and roll them into production quickly will win the battle for consumer hearts, as well as consumer wallets. A new service that allows a customer to sample a streaming service for a few weeks as it launches is a great way to let consumers decide if they like the service without heavy financial penalties (especially with unlimited data plans going away), but also for an operator to market its service to specific demographics that will use the service in the future. It also enables the mobile operator to give its consumers services that they WANT, and turn that into customer loyalty and stickiness.

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