I was reading an interview with George Dyson, and during the interview, he made a comment that really caught my attention. He was speaking of the volumes of data that many people have to deal with, and his comment was “Information is cheap, meaning is expensive”. The comment resonated for me, as it encapsulated the headline of a new product from Procera called PacketLogicTM Report Studio.
Two of the biggest challenges that network operators face is 1) information overload, and 2) lack of relevant information. There are plenty of Internet trends reports that can tell you what is happening on networks around the world, but NONE of them tell you what is really happening on your network. Most Intelligent Policy Enforcement solutions can generate many canned reports, and even place them on pretty web pages, but they are all statically configured templates and reports. Most network operators can tell you down to the byte how much traffic is on their network, but that information does not allow you to plan new service offerings. It can also mislead you into thinking that you need to add more capacity to your network, but it may be that the excess bandwidth is being taken up by applications that you should not spend money to enable.
A perfect example of this is the recent push for “Facebook for Free” plans. This is a great marketing plan, as it resonates with the “hyper-connected” crowd. However, in studies that we have done in North America, operators considering Facebook for Free plans should know that Facebook sites have 5x the number of connections AND incoming traffic and users spend as much as 10x active time on Facebook in a day than the next most popular site. For a fixed line operator, this is probably not a big issue. For a mobile operator, it means that the subscriber will be connected for a far longer time to their network (dramatically increasing the attach percentage for the subscriber), and using almost as much bandwidth as streaming video sites. Although this still may be a great service offering, the operator needs to be able to evaluate the business and technical issues with this service specific to their business model – based on the ACTUAL devices, locations, and service plans that they have in use in their network (not a canned report based on industry averages).
PacketLogic Report Studio is a leap forward in that it allows operators to easily create these reports with the fine-grained information that is available to them with the PacketLogic Solution. I recently contributed an article to Wireless Week at http://www.wirelessweek.com/Articles/2011/11/Technology-Darwinism-Goes-Mobile-Wireless-Networks/, and the concluding line for the report sums up nicely what I think the issue for network operators is going forward.
“Mobile operators that lack this knowledge will struggle to launch new services. They will become followers, not industry leaders. In a market where only the strong survive and the rest of the players are consumed, not using business-ready network intelligence will put a mobile operator at risk of being the modern day equivalent of the dodo.”
