Posts Tagged ‘bandwidth’

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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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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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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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Taking PacketLogic to School…

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 by Cam Cullen

Over the past twelve months, Procera has experienced great successes in the Higher Education market across the globe. Although there are a number of contributing factors to this achievement, a few reasons have really begun to stand out in our minds as to why we have been so successful in this space.

Higher Education institutions around the world have quickly realized that their networks are a critical component in their success, ensuring that the bandwidth is managed properly and that the students have access to the resources that they need to succeed in the classroom is critical. The cost of this bandwidth can quickly spiral out of control, as students will use every bit of available bandwidth – “Just because it is there”. Since all applications do not have the same performance or latency requirements from the network, it makes sense to ensure that real-time applications (VOIP, conferencing, video, etc.) have the necessary bandwidth needed to operate effectively, and congestion on the Internet link is very common. The available bandwidth to universities has dramatically increased over the past few years, to the point where many require not just 1Gbps of network performance, but even up to 10Gbps of capacity of traffic management, and they have outgrown their existing traffic management solutions.

In the United States, there is even a mandate called the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) that instructs Higher Education institutions to take action to help control illegal file sharing. Procera has helped many higher education institutions comply with the HEOA by helping them effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials by allowing them to control the use of file sharing technologies on their network – typically a huge contributor to network congestion and bandwidth usage. It has also saved many University CIOs from receiving letters from the MPAA and RIAA about the copyright violations occurring on their network, not to mention helped pare back their overhead by reducing the number of DMCA take-down notices they receive

From our perspective, Higher Education institutions are the breeding ground for new and exciting applications. Being installed in as many of these networks as possible keeps us at the forefront of application trends, as we have seen the use of streaming video, social networking applications, and VOIP/IM applications from around the world skyrocket in these environments, and they continue to keep our signature database ahead of competitors that do not have the same exposure and responsiveness to the Higher Education customer base. We have also benefited from these customers’ deployments as they are often more sophisticated in their use of policies to control bandwidth than even some service providers, so they give PacketLogic a good workout and ensure that our solutions maintain performance and visibility under even heavy loads. We have also experienced good feedback on our implementations of IPv6, which are becoming more and more critical to research universities and international consortiums, as IPv6 has become more prevalent on Internet2 links. We strongly believe that IPv6 will become more critical to networks around the world, and are working to provide the leading IPv6-aware traffic management solution on the market.

Besides, how can you have an “Intelligent” enforcement solution without going to school every once in awhile? We learn something new every day at Procera, and it is often our education customers that teach us that lesson.

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Cloudy with a Chance of Internet Showers

Monday, March 14th, 2011 by Cam Cullen

The Cloud” has been a hot topic in the technology space for some time now, with the term becoming so mainline that many companies are using it as a tagline in mainstream advertising (ala Microsoft with their “To the cloud!” campaign). With “The Cloud”, the thinking goes; I can just have my data readily available for access, regardless of my device, location, or access technology. I can always access my pictures (everyone certainly wants to see my pictures of my family vacation!), my documents or spreadsheets, check my balance in my checking account, and my contact database.

Great idea! But what if the cloud is not accessible? Or your access to the cloud is so bad that it might as well be offline?

The concept of the cloud is a great security blanket. It’s like never having to worry about leaving your keys locked in your car or forgetting your wallet when you need it the most. Information is always available, and you can call it up on a moment’s notice. I had a personal experience with the beauty of the cloud this weekend, when I was in New York City that kind of drove home how expectations have changed with respect to access to the Internet. I took the train to NYC, using the on-board Wi-Fi to do work during the ride. I was, you see, trying to access the cloud so that I could have access to salesforce.com, as welI as participate in an online chat conference with some colleagues. I decided on the train as my mode of transport due to the availability of Internet Access and planned to get work done on the train ride. However, the connection was so bad and overloaded, that getting any online work done became impossible. However, the cloud did not fail me completely, as I also have an Android phone, and I can use that phone as a mobile hotspot, which since it supports an HSPA connection, is highly effective in emergency cases, and I was able to complete what I needed to get done (although just barely in a few cases, as occasionally I would drop into 3G or even EDGE areas where access slowed to a crawl.

I have seen and heard of many cases of consumers behaving in a business role (think travelers or telecommuters) that have suffered due to their connectivity and as a result, their companies and businesses have suffered. I know that many companies would be willing (even eager) if they could pay HIGHER amounts for broadband access for some of their employees to ensure that the latest sales forecasts, material orders, or even POs could be placed. Or in the case that I described above, to use more data in emergency cases and pay a bundled daily usage charge (or a reduced rate data package). If I am tethering my phone to my PC, some of the mobile data packages available today are woefully inadequate for even a single day’s work and email (It feels as if I get 1G of data in just email alone some days, much less add web browsing where some pages are 1MB alone – I am looking at you Yahoo with your front page), and a 250MB per month allowance is not sufficient.

Even in the US, where a lot of attention is being paid to tiered services and usage-based pricing models, allowances are made for “managed” services. More options should exist for data plans targeted towards mobile business professionals, as since the bills for these services are subsidized by corporations, the user is not acting as a consumer when they purchase the plan. I have always believed that even flat rate access can be tiered, and I know that if my company could pay to make sure that I had better access for my business traffic as part of my service plan they would be willing to. For example:

  • Prioritize my VPN traffic (even if it requires IP address destination-based rules)
  • Prioritize traffic to SF.com
  • Prioritize IM (which is critical for me to communicate quickly, succinctly, and cheaply with colleagues around the world)
  • Prioritize email access to my corporate server
  • Prioritize access to my file drop-box service (which I sometimes need to use to transfer large presentations, documents, or software versions).
  • And maybe most importantly – GIVE ME A BETTER RATE FOR ROAMING DATA!

Although I would use more bandwidth in the above case, this is offset by a willingness to pay more for this access on an ongoing basis (or as the last point makes, on a per usage basis for roaming). Roaming access to the cloud is completely unacceptable (especially overseas), as often just opening up email exceeds the $50 limit that is set in most countries for user notification.

As broadband providers are consistently looking for ways to generate more revenue, I suggest looking to the business user and offering us plans that would enhance our Quality of Experience – not just with quality access to the internet, but also quality of billing experience. Many users are very willing to pay more for access, and the opportunity is there for you to take advantage of that by offering plans that deliver.

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A World In Motion

Monday, February 14th, 2011 by Jon Linden

Did you notice the change? I know it’s subtle. But yes, you’re right, the Procera tagline changed to “Policy Enforcement In Motion”. Why? Well, there are a lot of good reasons. Let me try and explain.

Change is good. Everyone in this industry must embrace change, or get out. I’ve been with Procera for ten years now (wow, that made me sound like a dinosaur), but it feels like I’ve been at several different companies in many different industries. That’s how much things have changed over these ten years. Still, I would argue that we’ve stuck to our path, which has rendered us the technology leadership position in our segment.

So, what is our segment? That’s the key question, and we must continuously ensure that our messaging and technology is contemporary and up to date. The first question I got at a panel discussion in London this Fall was “what is the biggest change in DPI over the last five years?” My answer was that “DPI has evolved from being an autonomous product resolving a particular issue, mainly rampaging P2P traffic volumes, to becoming fully integrated into policy management.”

This integration is not just in network diagrams. It’s also integration into a complete ecosystem – the Policy and Charging Control (PCC) ecosystem. We’ve been evangelizing tiered services for years now, but it wasn’t until mobile operators started seeing large traffic volumes and serious revenue contribution from data services that this took off. And with these new demands came new requirements, and suddenly we had policy control, policy enforcement, online charging and more.

In this context, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is not a fair and complete description of what we do. We’re certainly not shying away from the fact that DPI is the core technology that gives us, and our fellow competitors, our competitive edge by associating type of traffic with subscriber, service plan, location and device. But ‘everyone’ claims to have DPI today, which is why policy enforcement is a much better description of what we actually do. And to make us justice in comparison with dumber equipment that enforces policies – like GGSNs – it’s fair to say Intelligent Policy Enforcement. Voilá, there you go, another three-letter acronym: IPE!

The applications enabled by the solution IPE are the same as before. The value proposition is around business intelligence, network optimization, network protection and tiered services. But as a component in the PCC ecosystem we can do more, and we can do it better. We can make our visions become reality and have a serious impact on bottom-line for service providers who are evolving, who innovate, and who are wiling to try new things to provide a better and sexier service to their customers. A necessity in today’s highly competitive hyper-connected society where everyone must check emails and Facebook at least every two minutes to ensure that they have not missed something important.

We, just like our customers, evolve – or move ahead. But in motion is also a word game to point out that the mobile operators drive these new requirements. We are the incumbent IPE vendor to some of the most prevailing mobile operators in the world. We’ve learnt, through real-life experience, how these operators function and what they need.

So, now you know why we do intelligent policy enforcement (IPE) based on advanced deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, to mobile operators that constantly evolve to accommodate customers in motion in a hyper-connected world that keeps spinning. Or in other words, why we do Policy Enforcement In Motion. I’m off. Back to the MWC show floor again – a place where there’s certainly a lot of motion!

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FCC Net Neutrality Legislation Impact on Procera

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 by James Brear

Today, the FCC passed a ruling that creates a Network Neutrality framework and provides guidance on “acceptable” practices for broadband service providers. There are several key tenets that we take away from the ruling, which have very positive implications for Procera.

1) Application blocking is prohibited for lawful applications and content – because providers already follow this standard in the US, this is not a big change. This does, however, imply that there is an opportunity for service providers to block unlawful applications or content in the future (child pornography for example), either by default or as an opt-in service.

2) Transparency is a must – to achieve transparency providers must disclose their network management procedures. This has become a common practice since the beginning of the Network Neutrality debate and will not be a big change for major providers.

3) “Reasonable Network Management” is allowed – while allowing reasonable network management was expected, the FCC has not defined reasonable beyond no blocking of lawful applications and content using a transparent approach. It is important to recognize that managing congestion can be achieved in a number of ways, and the more network intelligence built into the service provider’s network  (which can be provided by Procera’s solutions), the more effectively the provider can deal with congestion. Our policy enforcement solutions provide more network management options than any other available solution; this bodes well for our installed base of customers.

4) Tiered Services are allowed – although allowing for tiered services might be controversial, the positive outcomes of tiered services should prevail. Service Providers can now create lower cost plans to expand the reach of broadband to those who cannot afford even the lowest cost plans available today, while raising the price for users that consume high volumes of data (and negatively affect the broadband experience for other users). This is no different than utility services in the US, such as electricity and water utilities, that bill based on usage, and there can be penalties for high usage during peak hours.

Although the ruling might not deliver what either side of the debate was hoping for, it does support continued investment in network infrastructure by providing opportunities for innovative service offerings while preventing providers from blocking lawful over-the-top services. It leaves providers with room to offer service plans that are designed explicitly for over-the-top video services (e.g., a different usage plan for video services that is separate from regular data services) that enable high-volume video consumers to continue to enjoy the abundance of video available over the Internet.

This ruling is positive for Procera by allowing our installed base of customers and new customers to take advantage of our industry-leading policy enforcement technology to create innovative service offerings that provide an opportunity for a return on continued investment in broadband network infrastructure.

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Holiday Gift of the Year: Streaming Video (Coming to a Home Near You This Holiday Season)

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010 by Cam Cullen

There has been lots of talk lately on how video is now the most significant application on the Internet. As a memorable song from the 1970’s says, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

Video has been the main bandwidth driver on the Internet for a long time. When filesharing was first introduced, music files were definitely the initial draw. But as broadband proliferated and the DivX codec was introduced, video became the filetype of choice for filesharing. Video has evolved from delayed gratification (i.e. download and wait) to the now ubiquitous streaming video. Over the past few years, YouTube and Hulu have become staples for video afficianados, and the introduction of smartphones and mobile broadband have exploded the accessibility of streaming video beyond just the PC. Over the past year, Netflix (at least in the US) has become a growing force in the entertainment field, and now has support for a wide variety of hardware platforms, ranging from gaming consoles, DVD/BluRay players, Internet connected TVs, and dedicated streaming systems. Apple TV and Google TV are also coming on the scene, and the fun is just getting started for broadband providers.

The market is being flooded this holiday season with “more connected” devices. Retailers that were initially hoping that 3D TVs would be the “Gift of Choice” have shifted their focus to hawking their Internet connected TVs for the holidays. “Ordinary” consumers will soon have multiple broadband connected devices in their home taking advantage of a plethora of streaming video-capable devices (the “Hyper-Connected” families already have this, but that is a topic for a future blog).  It is not unreasonable to expect that a well-connected home may simultaneously have a gaming console watching a Netflix movie, a smartphone watching YouTube, a tablet watching Hulu Plus, and a TV watching Google TV. I believe that this year will be a significant tipping point for video, as there are more devices available than ever before, and the available content is greater than ever before.

Broadband providers that have been struggling with video traffic already are in for a rude surprise on Christmas Day when all of these presents are opened and start to connect themselves to the Internet. Consumer electronics manufacturers are relying on the ability of the broadband connections to validate this market, and if the network fails to deliver, it could have a negative impact on the economy as a whole. No pressure at all.

Fortunately, the intelligence to understand the video traffic and to ensure that it has good quality is available on the market today. Just look up your local Procera sales representative.

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The Butterfly Effect Applied to the Internet: Google Instant

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 by Cam Cullen

There is a well-publicized metaphor called the Butterfly Effect that summarizes the effect of chaos theory by posing the idea that a butterfly’s wings can create tiny changes in the atmosphere that can cause a tornado somewhere in the world. Google recently introduced a feature called “Google Instant” for search optimization that may have the same type of effect on the Internet.

If you go to Google’s search page and begin to type in the search box, Google will take every letter that you type and return a full search result page as you type. For example, if you enter “t” in as the first letter, Google returns a page with the first entry as Target, and other associated Target web sites. Add a “w” as the second letter, and the search page result changes to Twitter, with a number of associated Twitter sites. Add another “il” and suddenly you are transported to the world of Twilight, Stephanie Meyer’s successful vampire love story. Interestingly enough, The Twilight search page has picture and video thumbnails and graphic returned, even though I have not even completed my search. Any letters that I add continue to suggest pages dynamically. Previously, Google would only suggest search terms (but not make an actual search) based on your browser or search history.

This innovation by Google results in faster response to searches by users, as the search page is essentially immediately available as you complete typing in your full search query, and if you are lucky enough to be searching for someone or something that is at the top of the list, you can get to the result much faster than before Instant was launched.

But at what cost?

A quick look at some of the traffic results from some of our deployed systems shows that since the launch of Google Instant, traffic to Google Search has grown 125% to 200% (i.e. doubled) since the launch of Instant and the number of connections used has increased dramatically. Based on testing, the difference is driven by searches that generate images as part of the search rather than just simple text, which generate more connections and use more bandwidth. Granted, the total volume of bandwidth is still small compared with other applications, but with the frequency of searches on the Internet, this feature will likely attract more people over time, which will drive more traffic to Google. This will in turn make sponsoring these Instant search results more popular and lucrative, and sponsors will put more effort into making the search results more attractive (read more graphics). This will result in more bandwidth being used for each letter typed in the search.

As a user, I don’t think that Google Instant is a bad thing, I am actually very impressed by the speed that it adds to searches, and when I know exactly what I am looking for, I don’t even register the intermediate pages as I type in my search.   The challenge will be for network infrastructures that are already strained on bandwidth and connection scalability (firewall systems for example) to cope with the increase in the number of sessions and bandwidth utilization resulting from this new feature.

People often ask about the “Next Big Thing” on the Internet, and sometimes it is not a new video application, or release of a new P2P client, but a small thing that can have big repercussions on overall network traffic. Doubling any type of traffic is a noteworthy occurrence, and if you can do that in a single day by launching a new feature, you must be living on Internet Time. Google and others will continue to innovate at a rapid pace, and understanding the impact of new applications and new capabilities is still a critical business requirement for network operators. Procera’s solutions provide valuable information to network operators to help them keep up with the rapid changes on their networks.

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