A Real Tsunami Warning

With ATT’s Ralph de la Vega making the stunning announcement last week that 3% of its smart phone users accounted for 40% of its network capacity while pointing a finger at video makes a very compelling story for video optimization. The iPhone has enabled and enamored so many users to access video that adoption will only grow and grow.  His announcement is equivalent to a seismograph shaking its little needle off the paper.

The long awaited video tsunami is pulling the water away from the beach now. And it’s all going to come crashing back. De la Vega hinted of usage-based charging or ‘other’ incentives to motivate users to throttle back. There will be a backlash on ATT.  Subscribers will get sensitive about dropped calls, QoS, and monitor their bills closely.  This will lead to a rash of customer service calls for credits, justifications, explanations.  Many will jump ship to Verizon. Handset makers and content providers are going to complain that uptake is slowed, etc.  (That’s another story all together regarding ‘over-the-top’ plays).

But the savvy operator will take note and gird up for this onslaught before it reaches them. As iPhone and Android devices take off worldwide, the operators that remember their Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’, are going to protect themselves with bandwidth optimization facilities such as Dilithium’s DVO. DVO provides the operator the ability to control, throttle, and reduce the impact that video puts on the network. This is just the beginning.

Read More Here:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/09/technology/AP-US-TEC-ATT-Data-Usage.html?_r=1&hpw

Mobile Streaming Video Grows 58% Last Quarter

Worldwide mobile data bandwidth usage has grown 30 percent during the second quarter of 2009, says Allot Communications. Asia leads the growth with 36 percent; Europe posted 28 percent growth and the Americas 25 percent.

Heavy data users do not distinguish between their fixed and their mobile networks and seem to expect the same service from the Internet, irrespective of their access method, the report says.

That is going to be a problem, for the same reason a small percentage of heavy users create performance issues for all other users, one might reasonably conclude. The other issue is that the fastest-growing traffic type is streaming video, which grew 58 percent during the quarter. Since streaming video requires 100 times the bandwidth of a voice call, you can imagine what the problem is.

Go to Gary’s blog @ http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com

Network Video Optimization 101

There is a generally accepted term in mobile networks called optimization.  In this sense it usually involves tweaking the radio base station antennas in terms of down tilt, messing around with the power settings and figuring out the best combination of cell-sites that provide the best results for handover and handoff.  This and dozens of other techniques make it possible for the best sound quality and power and to make sure calls are not dropped when you’re driving at 70 mph down the highway.

For delivering video services over 3G and LTE networks a number of other considerations come into view.  Besides having to deliver high quality multimedia to a variety of devices over radio frequencies, there is the need to optimize the video to minimize the amount of bandwidth that these services take up.  This is especially needed as more and more people use video (driven by iPhone for example) and use up all the available bandwidth in a given cell site, requiring operators to deploy more radio base stations and transceivers, all of which are incredibly expensive.

Using services such as Video Network Optimization, operators can reduce the rate from say 140kbps to 110kbps while insuring no decline in perceivable video quality to end customers.  The technology behind this takes a lot of experience from companies that are experts in mobile video but can deliver great cost savings which are going to be needed as video explodes in the mobile network.

What do you think are the biggest challenges in optimizing mobile video networks?  How will the coming rollouts of LTE (as with Verizon in the US) make the need for this even more important?  What are the key technologies and techniques that can be utilized?

Key Technology Advances for Video Quality

The delivery of video services is far more complex than that of pure voice or data. Dilithium engineers and technical experts have been involved in broad range of standard and technology development in the audio/video compression and multimedia communication areas since the early 1990s. Today’s Dilithium products and solutions are underpinned by many of these technologies, either in a unique offering or as part of the standards.

Different telecommunication networks today utilize different audio/voice codecs. The variation is due to the different conditions (bit-rates, delays, error recovery/concealments, etc…) that govern a particular network. Within an industry (e.g. mobile/cellular) different codecs may also be dominant or mandated, as is the case in GSM/WCDMA and CDMA/CDMA-2000 networks. Another example of variation is between broadband VoIP codecs (e.g. the ITU-T G.72X series) and the mobile-oriented voice codecs.

The variations of audio/voice codecs used across networks necessitate transcoding because of bit-rates restrictions and the complexity involved in terminals supporting codecs of other networks. For example WCMDA handsets do not/cannot support G.72X series of codecs.

Video Network Optimization

What if you could squeeze 20-40% more bandwidth from the network while delivering quality services to subscribers at a lower cost?  Sound too good to be true?  People forget that MP3 technology allowed for the advent (eventually) of the iPod and other audio and video compression techniques enabled much of the services we take for granted today on our various devices.

The whole area of video network optimization requires an understanding of how multimedia is squeezed through the radio, core, and service layer networks. We will be expanding on this topic much more in coming posts.

Right now though, there are products available that take a lot of what our company has pioneered around transcoding to enable a huge amount of more video traffic at any given cell-site or radio network.

For instance (sales pitch ahead!):  Leveraging the transcoding and transrating capabilities of the Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA) allows existing network deployment to serve greater numbers of customers when serving video content over mobile broadband networks. Thus, our DVO solution reduces network build-out costs and provides quality video services with less radio, core and service layer components.

So how important will network video optimization be for service providers?  Will the end-customer be able to see a difference?  What are the true cost savings and benefits?