After surveying the exhibit floor, I gathered that about 40% of the exhibitors were selling accessories, another 30% were mobile device centric, with the remaining 30% of the exhibitors selling a wide range of network infrastructure components, from RAN power systems to network elements. Mobile payments held some spotlight. On the floor, the mobile service providers were hawking mobile solutions that spanned vertical applications such as automotive telemetry, security systems, healthcare, and education.

From a device standpoint, nothing new was presented – most of the latest products were announced at Mobile World Congress in late February. Samsung was notably absent from the show; I guess they didn’t want anyone (like me) comparing the HTC One X with the Samsung Galaxy S3. LG and HTC invested considerable effort in showcasing their handsets. Video and camera capabilities came out on top as the features to “focus” on in their respective demonstration areas. HTC also offered a complete sound room to demonstrate Beats audio codec integration on the HTC One. LG dedicated a demonstration area to show how their phones control their home appliance and audio system components. Upon further thought, I am not sure if I am ready to use an app on my phone that remotely starts my washing machine. I can just see it – bubbles everywhere!

Keynote presentations delivered by the CEOs of Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T Mobility were played to a packed auditorium. For Verizon, the message was all about the lack of spectrum and their efforts through acquisition and spectrum swaps to remedy the situation. Sprint’s Dan Hesse started his presentation by exclaiming that the future of mobile is personalized services. T-Mobile talked about intelligent unlimited data plans that switch from 4G to 3G speeds after base data plan quotas are reached. It’s interesting how the industry continues to re-define the term “unlimited plan.” AT&T messaging centered on their push into security and surveillance solutions for the home.

All in all, the show seems to be leaning towards the retail side of the mobile marketplace more than in the past. That said, you can’t beat the food and entertainment in New Orleans. That in itself will attract a large crowd!

My panel had the longest title ever – I can’t even remember it – but in essence, it was about whether the fastest return on investment comes from policy use cases that address congestion management, or from new service creation. In some mysterious way, we ended up with the everlasting question of when operators will be able to convince, or force, over the top (OTT) service providers to share revenue. I am sorry to say that my answer is “never.”

I see the attraction in the proposition to tap new revenue streams. I especially see it now, as the industry is transitioning from voice to data as the main revenue contributor, and at the same time the ARPU declines, and particularly since these potential revenue streams drive recurring additional infrastructure investments. But honestly, why would they pay? The end-user will switch operators before they replace YouTube as their preferred video service.

I guess content is still king here.

The main reason, though, is that operators lack the billing relationship with the OTTs. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason why operators should pick up all the cost to meet the OTTs’ requirements. An observation over time is that new services will consume whatever bandwidth is available – increase the bandwidth and the services will consume more bandwidth. In my opinion, it makes sense to let the OTTs pick up a significant piece of the bill to accommodate their requirements, e.g. for CDNs, optimization solutions, and new technology innovations.

Let me give you an example of how OTTs adapt. Operators lowered the data caps when Netflix launched their service in Canada. Netflix responded by delivering a smaller video stream by changing codec and compression. I look at this as an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, it is good for everyone if all parties make money. Everyone depends on each other, which creates symbiosis. Operators deliver a communication service with a certain set of conditions, and it is up to the OTTs to make the most out of those circumstances.

A partnership approach also will enable more collaborative cooperation. This might not equal new revenue streams, but a Spotify bundle can attract a certain kind of subscribers that you would like, and make the customer relation stickier. The first lesson in business development is focus on your core business. So, focus on your core business of delivering a first class communication service to the party you have a billing relationship with – the subscriber. (There is also a need for a radical change in pricing model, but that is a whole different topic– anyone up for a panel discussion?)

In summary, operators charging OTTs for customer access or traffic precedence has not happened to date, and I doubt it will happen in the future. But there are a lot of other values to be gained from a partner approach, and by pushing part of the investment to the party who should rightfully pick it up.

So stop envying the fact that OTTs make money – or even that they make really good money. In the end, this should generate more money for everyone in the ecosystem. Operators have many different battles to fight today, and will benefit from turning one of these challenges into an opportunity.

I’m off to check my YouTube streams. See ya.

• Government regulations/censorship (including private sector lobbying for more of this).
• Walled gardens, where content isn’t freely indexable by third parties.

The former is a problem. I can see why it’s happening, but the perceived (by politicians) problems aren’t always easy to solve by limiting access to this page or that site. We’ll leave that alone for now. 

Additionally, I think he’s spot on when he says that content providers need to shape up. The US has way better legal and reasonably cheap access to streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, the networks) than Europe*, and as such, has less movie/TV copying going on. It’s as simple as that; provide a better experience at a decent price and people will use it.

The walled garden, though, is another matter altogether. I’d say it boils down to user experience for the user and content provider alike. That’s where the walled garden shines and the free, wild net at large doesn’t.

This user experience boils down to three tenets:

1) Identity: The first cornerstone of the garden is identity. The gardener knows who you are, so whenever you do something inside said garden –  buy stuff, consume content – you don’t (always) need to fill in your credit card details or sign up to Yet Another Service. (I have more than 250 site logins in my personal password keychain. Yes, I had to buy a tool to manage my identity online before it got out of hand.)

Attempts at solving this problem in an open, non-obtrusive manner have all failed, more or less miserably. Site operators cave in and offer Facebook based signup procedures, Disqus-based discussion threads or other third party supplied services that lower the barrier of entry for the users. I can’t say I blame them.

2) Predictability: The second cornerstone lies in users’ knowing what they can expect. Sure, people gripe about the Facebook timeline and various other pet peeves, but the bottom line is that the gardens are known environments that behave in predictable ways. Additionally, it’s often possible to trust the garden without trusting every party inside it. I use PayPal whenever I need to buy stuff from some random country. Why? I know how it works, I trust them – I don’t necessarily trust the site operator to be on top of security or… well, sanity.

Yes, PayPal is a non-bank-regulated entity still offering monetary services, imposing arbitrary limits and being known for cutting people off for shaky reasons, with a very limited means of appeal for the affected. It’s still a better option than just whipping out the credit card because I know PayPal is at least semi-trustworthy, which is way more than what I know about joe-random-salesguy.mx.

On the server side, it’s essentially the same thing. As Cam pointed out a little while back, streaming tend to be a lot more fun on iOS than via Flash. Streaming to my Macbook works in different ways for Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and Crunchyroll. Streaming the same content to my iPad gives a way, way more consistent experience.

Services that try to do something interesting clientside and stick to web standards still must cope with people using old browsers or Flash versions, perhaps with unpredictable client platforms. It’d be very, very hard for non-huge site operators to test for anything but the true mainstream. If, on the other hand, I provide a service for iOS devices, they’re predictable. If I provide a service for Android devices, they’re predictable. Time can be spent doing useful things instead.

3) The almighty bill:  Long story short, if you’re living on the open Internet and make a living by selling original content, you have to figure out how to do this properly or die trying. If you’re a bit player, good luck. Even The New York Times is still trying to strike that balance. In contrast, a walled garden both makes illegally accessing your offered content difficult and while making it very easy for the user to pay (if required).

Naturally, life is much simpler if you’re Amazon – peddling actual wares and wanting to show the world your garden. Or Google, where you’d be happy to have and offer the benefits of a garden but your whole existence builds upon other people’s content, from search engine hits to cute kittens on YouTube.

In conclusion

The walled garden makes a lot of sense, both from a user perspective and a developer perspective. This is by no means beyond Google, who’s trying to re-implement Facebook, re-implement PayPal and use their clout to force OEMs into their own branded version of Android (“Do as we say, or you can’t have the Google apps”). Data in Android apps are by no means easier to index by search engine than data in iOS apps.

Perhaps the most telling thing, though, is that Mr. Brin is quite happy to complain that the services of others are closed (bad), while at the same time keeping the search API** of Google – you guessed it – closed.

*) Yes, we’re keenly aware that Netflix is available in some places in Europe, but you’ll find the Comedy/Sci Fi/Zombie and Alien crossover subcategory in the US store larger than the entire Comedy category in the UK one. Not quite the same thing.

**) Custom search is a far cry from API access to Google’s main index.

With the announcement of our PL7810 this week, we are delivering on a platform that uniquely addresses the demands of the higher education market. We stretched the boundaries of the high-end in January with the announcement of the industry-leading PL20000, and we are applying the same technology now to the lower end of the bandwidth spectrum with the PL7810..  More importantly though, the PL7810 represents an inflection point in the economics of deploying Intelligent Policy Enforcement, with bandwidth capabilities that are 1/5 the cost of the current going rate. Occupying a single rack unit and supporting the complete Procera feature set deployed at over a 1000 customers worldwide, the PL7810 also provides the density and connectivity options that allow for that one elusive tenet of network design — growth. No longer will growth require a cyclical and wholesale replacement of platform, i.e. the forklift upgrade. A single box can start at 100Mbps and grow to 5Gbps –something that is unprecedented in this market space.

Combine the PL7810’s impressive capabilities with SmartCampus and you really have something. This Procera solution connects identity and network communication, thereby enabling User Awareness in policy decisions. By answering the “Who?” and combining it with the answers to what, where, when and which device, policy that deftly considers all of these dimensions is now possible. While these important capabilities enable a boundless number of use cases, three are emerging as broadly applicable:

• Mapping user identity to network address, expediting DMCA takedown responses.
• Aggregating usage quota over all user devices: PC, tablet, gaming console and smart phone thereby simplifying provisioning, accounting and operations.
• Implementing tiered service levels to ensure fairness for all and maximize bandwidth utilization for power users.

Moving forward, these exciting new developments will drive further market acceptance for policy enforcement and more specifically Procera solutions. The PL7810 in combination with SmartCampus will redefine the future of customer use cases for higher education. Good things come in small packages, especially things from Procera.

Below is an excerpt from a Report Studio analysis from one small MSO site that shows the first weekend of the event had more than three times the second and third weekend of March Madness:

For this operator, all told, 5% of their subscriber base watched some part of the event online, but less than .5% were watching at any one time on the network.

A large service provider reported very similar percentage results for the final game (as reported by Report Studio):

The conclusion to draw from the March Madness and the Super Bowl Streaming events so far seems to be that the harder the content is to access on TV (or the novelty of the event), the more likely it is that consumers will choose the small screen over the large screen.  If it’s easy to see on TV, audiences, it appears, will still watch it there.

This is a topic that I will explore more in my next blog, which takes a look at what a video service is in relationship to devices; I think the definition for consumers of what a video service is has dramatically shifted over the past year.

We saw a first effort in this type of streaming with the Super Bowl on a large scale, but March Madness is a bit different, as it is an on-going, multi-week event, usually with a little local flavor for most people, at least at the beginning of the tournament. Since Procera is also deployed on many university networks, where cable replacement is prevalent with PCs, Consoles, and Tablets, we are also watching those networks.

The iPad stream is once again (similar to the Super Bowl) using a different site than the PC version, and below is an example of a real-time view (from my home). You can see the quality of the stream is pristine, and the latency is very low, and you can see that I am watching the Texas vs. Cincy game!

The Android version was of good quality (for the small screen on my Samsung Galaxy), and was actually using the same service as the iPad:

The PC version was using Flash Video (rather than HTTP Streaming Video)

We will monitor the progression of usage on this as the tournament continues, but here are a few interesting snapshots from the first day of the tournament (Thursday March 15^th):

University Site:

(marchmadnesslive.akamaihd.net on Akamai is the streaming site for NCAA for the PC)

(A single user snapshot over time from the same site)

Single location in small broadband operator:

A Larger Broadband Operator, Single Site:

(Note – Streaming Video was 40% of overall bandwidth for the day, March Madness was 1% of the overall streaming video on the network – which is not massive, but statistically significant.)

As you can see, there is definitely usage –and the Quality of Experience across all the networks was exemplary – most were at 100%. As another interesting point, I once again found the iPad viewing experience to be nearly flawless, but the browser-based on my Mac to leave quite a bit to be desired – as there were significant hiccups in getting video started, delays, etc.

We will keep an eye on the trends as the Madness continues – stay tuned!

One such case launched at MWC 2012, was Mobile Bono, a Mobile VOIP plan offered by Yoigo, a Procera customer. Mobile Bono allows a consumer to have a separate VOIP usage bucket (in addition to their normal volume plan) that they can use with VOIP applications like Viber, Skype, and Google Talk, with a cost of about one cent per minute – which certainly beats the price of an international call. With Microsoft pushing Skype aggressively, including integration with Facebook, this type of plan delivers great value to a consumer. In addition to the cost benefit, the service ensures that even if a user consumes all of their normal data plan, they could still place VOIP calls. I fully expect this type of add-on service to become more prevalent, and mash-ups integrating popular applications will become more and more commonplace.

Google was promising an Android in every pocket, and some of the new Android devices (including the Sony Tablet, Samsung Galaxy Note, and the LG Optimus Vu) that are larger screen devices that will encourage more bandwidth use for video streaming and media-rich browsing. New tablets are on the way (iPad3!!!!!), and expect mobile devices to continue to add more video streaming directly to them by not only OTT providers, but also cable and satellite providers in the home. This will condition consumers to expect video streaming on the mobile devices, creating a great opportunity for operators to deliver.

Operators will look to 3GPP-based services to deliver differentiated services that will allow them to offer attractive value to consumers without stifling them with unreasonable pricing plans for new LTE networks. LTE will succeed if the pricing plans allow for innovation, and flat rate plans are not going to make anyone profit.

The more standards-based a solution is, the easier it is for an operator to design and launch new services. Proprietary solutions are usually designed to “lock-in” a customer to a specific vendor, and can often dramatically slow the pace of business, as all new service rollouts require dedicated work from the supplier to enable the new services. Vendors that deviate place more risk onto the network deployment, and can lead to a great deal of frustration for customers and engineering teams.

Procera’s launching of the 3GPP Interoperability Lab is designed to simplify service launches for network operators. Not only can PCRF, PCEF, and OCS systems conduct interoperability testing, but the actual devices that the services are designed for can be tested. The “User Experience” for services has been neglected in the entire PCC Ecosystem, and operators launching services based on content, applications, or even devices types can quickly verify that the actual user traffic will be classified properly (and more importantly – charged correctly). We have already conducted several service tests for existing customers, and we have discovered some interesting behavior for different proposed services that can affect how services are seen from a network perspective (tethering is a great example of a use case that can be extremely tricky).

Our lab was originally created to simplify our signature development process, but as more and more operators came to us for service testing, we realized that we had a fantastic facility that could be used in conjunction with our customers for service testing. We have been able to help several operators launch services and show the real end-to-end experience for the customer, and verify that charging policies are correctly capturing the right traffic. The most critical factor for success in personalized services is correctness, and that goes far beyond “My PCRF can talk to your PCEF.”

Personalized Services are the engine that will enable operators to differentiate themselves from their competition, and the operators that can move the fastest with the most relevant services will quickly find that they have an advantage with the leading edge users. These users typically spend the most, are open to add-on services, and often the most critical when services do not operate as expected. More focus is being placed on the user experience, not just from a Quality of Experience, but also ensuring that service plans and billing reflect the actual user “experience” that they perceive through a browser, streaming video client, or console.

Mobile World Congress is expected to launch many new mobile devices, applications, and services. Stay tuned this week for our experiences from the show!

• Consumer: As a consumer, if I put data in the cloud to enable me to access it from multiple devices, I want to be able to access the data with some level of quality. The more important it is to me, the more likely I am to want to ensure that I have access.
• Business User: As a business user, especially when my broadband connection is subsidized by the company, I am willing to pay for priority access to that data. Services and applications like Salesforce.com, Webex/GoToMeeting, and especially VOIP, are business-critical. Failure to be able to access them in times of need could have negative business effects.
• Content or Application Provider: As a hosting customer, I want to ensure that the service that I am paying for is highly available, and that I am billed accurately for the usage. I also want reports on how my service is performing, who is accessing the service, peak usage, etc., so that I can plan for future growth and expansion.
• Hosting or Service Provider: The cloud hosting business is becoming a very attractive business, not only for broadband operators, but also for companies like Amazon and Google. The ability to deliver high quality services and provide business intelligence to their customers will set them apart from the pack.

In all cases – the ideal solution is something that can:
1) Provide Analytics: Ensure that all traffic is properly accounted for (i.e., charged) by the network, and analyze how the service needs to evolve over time
2) Provide Subscriber Awareness: Whether the hosting provider views the content as the subscriber, or the application owner views the incoming connection as a subscriber, the ability to treat each user according to their service class is vital for mission critical SLAs
3) Enforce SLAs and Control Bandwidth Usage: Ensure that each subscriber (whether consumer or hosted content operator) receives the appropriate levels of service, bandwidth, connection, etc.

Although not a traditional use for Intelligent Policy Enforcement, it is becoming more common for IPE systems to be deployed in front of the cloud services. The “subscribers” that the IPE system follows are then combinations of content owners and end-users, and the data center operator can now ensure that all receive the right level of service, and detailed billing records are available for SLA verification. This is the tip of the iceberg for this type of deployment. This function goes far beyond the simple QoS mechanisms that are often used in datacenters today.

Expect to see a great deal more activity in the Cloud going forward!

I personally watched both on my iPad and my Mac, and I can see why the performance was spotty. The biggest problem that I saw was that the stream was at least one play behind live action, and although I understand the reason for this, it meant that the stream was really only appropriate as a replacement, and not a supplement to the game, which is how NBC was trying to position the feed. The stream was pristine and beautiful on my iPad, with the bandwidth as shown below and the Quality of Experience metrics showing minimal packet loss on the network (to be fair, I am on Fiber to the Home)

My feed on my Mac was not as well done, with numerous cut-outs, the stream was of poor quality (about 500-700kbps), and was almost two plays behind the game when it was active. Although I did not lose many packets, the stream was not very satisfying. The only cool thing about the stream was that you could shift camera angles, and I used that trick a few times to try and sync the stream back up.

The Mac Stream and the iPad stream were coming from different servers, and based on a snapshot from a few customer networks, this may explain some of the issues. Below is a snapshot of the different user agents used to watch the game at one US MSO, with about 1.5% participation. The vast majority were Windows-based, but with a little bit of Mac thrown in (reflecting the larger PC market share).

There were some interesting techniques used by NBC to stream the Super Bowl. They were using streaming playlists to insert the ads into the streams, and rather than being a single connection, I saw connections coming up and down from different servers as the content sources moved around on my live feed.  There were even a few new tricks that could be seen in the properties of the http streams using our LiveView application, but I wouldn’t want to spill the beans for NBC.

Although the game was not quite what I was hoping for, the quality of the iPad stream was beautiful, and I hope that more events (Olympics, World cup) follow this model, as it is a significant enhancement and alternative to the TV broadcast. The Super Bowl was watched by 110M people – the World Cup was watch by over 700M worldwide – so that streaming event would be a bit more stressful worldwide. I expect to see more of this going forward, and as consumers get accustomed to the extras they receive online, events like this will put much more stress on operators.

Here are some Report Studio reports from some anonymized customer networks that our customers used to analyze the impact that the Super Bowl had on their networks.

1. SuperBowl DSL Report >
2. SuperBowl MSO Report >