Should regulators forfeit spectrum auctions if they cant resolve Net Neutrality / Fair Share?

I have been writing about Net Neutrality and Fair Share broadband usage for nearly 10 years. Both sides of the argument have merit and it is difficult to find a balanced view represented in the media these days. Absolutists would lead you to believe that internet usage should be unregulated with everyone able to stream, download, post anything anywhere, without respect for intellectual property or fair usage; while on the other side of the fence, service provider dogmatists would like to control, apportion, prioritize and charge based on their interests.

Of course, the reality is a little more nuanced. A better understanding of the nature and evolution of traffic, as well as the cost structure of networks help to appreciate the respective parties' stance and offer a better view on what could be done to reduce the chasm.

1. From a costs structure's perspective first, our networks grow and accommodate demand differently whether we are looking at fixed line / cable / fibre broadband or mobile. 
1. In the first case, capacity growth is function of technology and civil works. 
1. On the technology front, the evolution to dial up / PSTN  to copper and fiber increases dramatically to network's capacity and has followed ~20 years cycles. The investments are enormous and require the deployment, management of central offices and their evolution to edge compute date centers. These investments happen in waves within a relatively short time frame (~5 years). Once operated, the return on investment is function of the number of users and the utilisation rate of the asset, which in this case means filling the network with traffic.
2. On the civil works front, throughout the technology evolution, a continuous work is ongoing to lay transport fiber along new housing developments, while replacing antiquated and aging copper or cable connectivity. This is a continuous burn and its run rate is function of the operator's financial capacity.
2. In mobile networks, you can find similar categories but with a much different balance and impact on ROI.
1. From a technology standpoint, the evolution from 1G to 5G has taken roughly 10 years per cycle. A large part of the investment for each generation is a spectrum license leased from the regulating / government. In addition to this, most network elements, from the access to the core and OSS /BSS need to be changed. The transport part relies in large part on the fixed network above. Until 5G, most of these elements were constituted of proprietary servers and software, which meant a generational change induced a complete forklift upgrade of the infrastructure. With 5G, the separation of software and hardware, the extensive use of COTS hardware and the implementation of cloud based separation of traffic and control plane, should mean that the next generational upgrade will be les expensive with only software and part of the hardware necessitating complete refresh.
2. The civil work for mobile network is comparable to the fixed network for new coverage, but follows the same cycles as the technology timeframe with respect to upgrades and changes necessary to the radio access. Unlike the fixed network, though, there is an obligation of backwards compatibility, with many networks still running 2G, 3G, 4G while deploying 5G. The real estate being essentially antennas and cell sites, this becomes a very competitive environment with limited capacity for growth in space, pushing service providers to share assets (antennas, spectrum, radios...) and to deploy, whenever possible, multi technology radios.

The conclusion here is that you have fixed networks with long investment cycles and ROI, low margin, relying on number of connections and traffic growth. The mobile networks has shorter investment cycles, bursty margin growth and reduction with new generations.

What does this have to do with Net Neutrality / Fair Share? I am coming to it, but first we need to examine the evolution of traffic and prices to understand where the issue resides.

Now, in the past, we had to pay for every single minute, text, kb received or sent. Network operators were making money of traffic growth and were pushing users and content providers to fill their networks. Video somewhat changed that. A user watching a 30 seconds video doesn't really care / perceive if the video is at 720, 1080 or 4K, 30 or 60 fps. It is essentially the same experience. That same video, though can have a size variation of 20x depending on its resolution. To compound that issue, operators have foolishly transitioned to all you can eat data plans with 4G to acquire new consumers, a self inflicted wound that has essentially killed their 5G business case.

I have written at length about the erroneous assumptions that are underlying some of the discourses of net neutrality advocates. 

In order to understand net neutrality and traffic management, one has to understand the different perspectives involved.

• Network operators compete against each other on price, coverage and more importantly network quality. In many cases, they have identified that improving or maintaining quality of Experience is the single most important success factor for acquiring and retaining customers. We have seen it time and again with voice services (call drops, voice quality…), messaging (texting capacity, reliability…) and data services (video start, stalls, page loading time…). These KPI are the heart of the operator’s business. As a result, operators tend to either try to improve or control user experience by deploying an array of traffic management functions, etc...
• Content providers assume that highest quality of content (8K UHD for video for instance) equals maximum experience for subscriber and therefore try and capture as much network resource as possible to deliver it. Browser / apps / phone manufacturers also assume that more speed equals better user experience, therefore try to commandeer as much capacity as possible. 

The flaw here is the assumption that the optimum is the product of many maxima self-regulated by an equal and fair apportioning of resources. This shows a complete ignorance of how networks are designed, how they operate and how traffic flows through these networks.

This behavior leads to a network where resources can be in contention and all end-points vie for priority and maximum resource allocation. From this perspective one can understand that there is no such thing as "net neutrality" at least not in wireless networks. 

When network resources are over-subscribed, decisions are taken as to who gets more capacity, priority, speed... The question becomes who should be in position to make these decisions. Right now, the laissez-faire approach to net neutrality means that the network is not managed, it is subjected to traffic. When in contention, resources are managing traffic based on obscure rules in load balancers, routers, base stations, traffic management engines... This approach is the result of lazy, surface thinking. Net neutrality should be the opposite of non-intervention. Its rules should be applied equally to networks, devices / apps/browsers and content providers if what we want to enable is fair and equal access to resources.

As we are contemplating 6G, and hints of metaverse, augmented / mixed reality and hyper connectivity, the cost structure of network infrastructure hasn't yet been sufficiently decoupled from traffic growth and as we have seen, video is elastic and XR will be a heavy burden on the networks. Network operators have essentially failed so far to offer attractive digital services that would monetize their network investments. Video and digital services providers are already paying for their on premise and cloud infrastructure as well as transport, there is little chance they would finance telco operators for capacity growth.

Where does this leave us? It might be time for regulators / governments to either take an active and balanced role in Net Neutrality and Fair share to ensure that both side can find a sustainable business model or to forfeit spectrum auctions for next generations.

Operators transformation strategies - TELECOMtv

Telecom TV interview at Networks Functions Virtualization World Congress

SDN / NFV: Enemy of the state

Extracted from my SDN and NFV in wireless workshop.

I want to talk today about an interesting subject I have seen popping up over the last six months or so and in many presentations in the stream I chaired at the NFV world congress a couple of months ago.

In NFV and to a certain extent in SDN as well, service availability is achieved through a combination of functions redundancy and fast failover routing whenever a failure is detected in the physical or virtual fabric. Availability is a generic term, though and covers different expectations whether you are a consumer, operator or enterprise. The telecom industry has heralded the mythical 99.999% or five nines availability as the target to reach for telecoms equipment vendors.

This goal has led to networks and appliances that are super redundant, at the silicon, server, rack and geographical levels, with complex routing, load balancing and clustering capabilities to guarantee that element failures do not impact catastrophically services. In today's cloud networks, one arrives to the conclusion that a single cloud, even tweaked can't performed beyond three nines availability and that you need a multi-cloud strategy to attain five nines of service availability...

Consumers, over the last ten years have proven increasingly ready to accept a service that might not be always of the best quality if the price point is low enough. We all remember the start of skype when we would complain of failed and dropped calls or voice distortions, but we all put up with it mostly because it was free-ish. As the service quality improved, new features and subscriptions schemes were added, allowing for new revenues as consumers adopted new services.
One could think from that example that maybe it is time to relax the five nines edict from telecoms networks but there are two data points that run counter to that assumption.

1. The first and most prominent reason to keep a high level of availability is actually a regulatory mandate. Network operators operate not only a commercial network but also a series of critical infrastructure for emergency and government services. It is easy to think that 95 or 99% availability is sufficient until you have to deliver 911 calls, where that percentage difference means loss of life.
2. The second reason is more innate to network operators themselves. Year after year, polls show that network operators believe that the way they outcompete each others and OTTs in the future is quality of service, where service availability is one of the first table stakes. 

As I am writing this blog, SDN and NFV in wireless have struggled through demonstrating basic load balancing and static traffic routing, to functions virtualization and auto scaling over the last years. What is left to get commercial grade (and telco grade) offerings is resolving the orchestration bit (I'll write another post on the battles in this segment) and creating a service that is both scalable and portable.

The portable bit is important, as a large part of the value proposition is to be able to place functions and services closer to the user or the edge of the network. To do that, an orchestration system has to be able to detect what needs to be consumed where and to place and chain relevant functions there.
Many vendors can demonstrate that part. The difficulty arises when it becomes necessary to scale in or down a function or when there is a failure.

Physical and virtual functions failure are to be expected. When they arise in today's systems, there is a loss of service, at least for the users that were using these functions. In some case, the loss is transient and a new request / call will be routed to another element the second time around, in other cases, it is permanent and the session / service cannot continue until another one is started.

In the case of scaling in or down, most vendors today will starve the virtual function and route all new requests to other VMs until this function can be shut down without impact to live traffic. It is not the fastest or the most efficient way to manage traffic. You essentially lose all the elasticity benefits on the scale down if you have to manage these moribund zombie-VNFs until they are ready to die.

Vendors and operators who have been looking at these issues have come to a conclusion. Beyond the separation of control and data plane, it is necessary to separate further the state of each machine, function service and to centralize it in order to achieve consistent availability, true elasticity and manage disaster recovery scenarios.

In most cases, this is a complete redesign for vendors. Many of them have already struggled to port their product to software, then port it to hypervisor, then optimized for performance... separating state from the execution environment is not going to be just another port. It is going to require redesign and re architecting.

The cloud-native vendors who have designed their platform with microservices and modularity in mind have a better chance, but there is still a series of challenges to be addressed. Namely, collecting state information from every call in every function, centralizing it and then redistribute it is going to create a lot of signalling traffic. Some vendors are advocating some inline signalling capabilities to convey the state information in a tokenized fashion, others are looking at more sophisticated approaches, including state controllers that will collect, transfer and synchronize relevant controllers across clouds.
In any case, it looks like there is still quite a lot of work to be done in creating truly elastic and highly available virtualized, software defined network.

Time to get out of consumer market for MNOs?

I was delivering a workshop on SDN / NFV in wireless, last week, at a major pan-european tier one operator group and the questions of encryption and net neutrality were put again on the table.

How much clever, elastic, agile software-defined traffic management can we really expect when "best effort" dictates the extent of traffic management and encryption renders many efforts to just understand traffic composition and velocity difficult?

There is no easy answer. I have spoken at length on both subjects (here and here, for instance) and the challenges have not changed much. Encryption is still a large part of traffic and although it is not growing as fast as initially planned after Google, Netflix, Snapchat or Facebook's announcements it is still a dominant part of data traffic. Many start to think that HTTPS / SSL is a first world solution, as many small and medium scale content or service providers that live on a freemium or ad-sponsored models can't afford the additional cost and latency unless they are forced to. Some think that encryption levels will hover around 50-60% of the total until mass adoption of HTTP/2 which could take 5+ years. We have seen, with T-Mobile's binge on  a first service launch that actively manages traffic, even encrypted to an agreed upon quality level. The net neutrality activists cried fool at the launch of the service, but quickly retreated when they saw the popularity and the first tangible signs of collaboration between content providers, aggregators and operators for customers' benefit.

As mentioned in the past, the problem is not technical, moral or academic. Encryption and net neutrality are just symptoms of an evolving value chain where the players are attempting to position themselves for dominance. The solution with be commercial and will involve collaboration in the form of content metadata exchange, to monitor, control and manage traffic. Mobile Edge Computing can be a good enabler in this. Mobile advertising, which is still missing over 20b$ in investment in the US alone when compared to other media and time spent / eyeball engagement will likely be part of the equation as well.

...but what happens in the meantime, until the value chain realigns? We have seen consumer postpaid ARPU declining in most mature markets for the last few years, while we seen engagement and usage of so-called OTT services explode. Many operators continue to keep their head in the sand and thinking of "business as usual" while timidly investigating new potential "revenue streams".

I think that the time has come for many to wake up and take hard decisions. In many cases, operators are not equipped organizationally or culturally for the transition that is necessary to flourish in a fluid environment where consumer flock to services that are free, freemium, or ad sponsored. What operators know best, subscription services see their price under intense pressure because OTTs are looking at usage and penetration at global levels, rather than per country. For these operators who understand the situation and are changing their ways, the road is still long and with many obstacles, particularly on the regulatory front, where they are not playing by the same rules as their OTT competition.

I suggest here that for many operators, it is time to get out. You had a good run, made lots of money on consumer services through 2G, 3G and early 4G, the next dollars or euros are going to be tremendously more expensive to get than the earlier.
At this point, I think there are emerging and underdeveloped verticals (such as enterprise and IoT) that are easier to penetrate (less regulatory barriers, more need for managed network capabilities and at least in the case of enterprise, more investment possibilities).
I think that at this stage, any operator who derives most of its revenue from consumer services should assume that these will likely dwindle to nothing unless drastic operational, organizational and cultural changes occur.
Some operator see the writing on the wall and have started the effort. There is no guarantee that it will work, but certainly having a software defined, virtualized elastic network will help if they are betting the farm on service agility. Others are looking at new technologies, open source and standards as they have done in the past. Aligning little boxes from industry vendors in neat powerpoint roadmap presentations, hiring a head of network transformation or virtualization... for them, the reality, I am afraid will come hard and fast. You don't invest in technologies to build services. You build services first and then look at whether you need more or new technologies to enable them.

Mobile Edge Computing 2016 is released!

5G networks will bring extreme data speed and ultra low latency to enable Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, augmented, mixed and virtual reality and countless new services.

Mobile Edge Computing is an important technology that will enable and accelerate key use cases while creating a collaborative framework for content providers, content delivery networks and network operators. 

Learn how mobile operators, CDNs, OTTs and vendors are redefining cellular access and services.

Mobile Edge Computing is a new ETSI standard that uses latest virtualization, small cell, SDN and NFV principles to push network functions, services and content all the way to the edge of the mobile network. 

This 70 pages report reviews in detail what Mobile Edge Computing is, who the main actors are and how this potential multi billion dollar technology can change how OTTs, operators, enterprises and machines can enable innovative and enhanced services.

Providing an in-depth analysis of the technology, the architecture, the vendors's strategies and 17 use cases, this first industry report outlines the technology potential and addressable market from a vendor, service provider and operator's perspective.

Table of contents, executive summary can be downloaded here.

Net neutrality, meet lawful interception

This post is written today from the NFV World Congress where I am chairing the first day track on operations. Many presentations in the pre-show workshop day point to an increased effort from standards bodies (ETSI, 3GPP..) and open source organizations (OpenStack, OpenDaylight...) to address security by design in next generations networks architecture.
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly invited to contribute or advise to the standardization work to ensure their needs are baked into the design of these networks. Unfortunately, it seems that there is a large gap between lawful agencies requirements, standards and regulatory bodies. Many of the trends we are observing in mobile networks, from software defined networking to network functions virtualization and 5G assume that operators will be able to intelligently route traffic and apportion resources elastically. Lawful interception regulations mandate that operators, upon a lawful request, may provide means to monitor, intercept, transcribe any electronic communication to security agencies.

It has been hard to escape the headlines, lately when it comes to mobile networks, law enforcement and privacy. On one hand, privacy is an inalienable right that we should all be entitled to, on the other hand, we elect governments with the expectation that they will be able to protect us from harm, physical or digital. 

Digital harm, until recently, was mostly illustrated by misrepresentation, scams or identity theft. Increasingly, though, it translates into the physical world, as attacks can impact not only one's reputation, credit rating but also one's job, banking and soon cars, and connected devices.

I have written at length about the erroneous assumptions that are underlying many of the discourses of net neutrality advocates. 

In order to understand net neutrality and traffic management, one has to understand the different perspectives involved.

• Network operators compete against each other on price, coverage and more importantly network quality. In many cases, they have identified that improving or maintaining quality of Experience is the single most important success factor for acquiring and retaining customers. We have seen it time and again with voice services (call drops, voice quality…), messaging (texting capacity, reliability…) and data services (video start, stalls, page loading time…). These KPI are the heart of the operator’s business. As a result, operators tend to either try to improve or control user experience by deploying an array of traffic management functions, etc...
• Content providers assume that highest quality of content (HD for video for instance) equals maximum experience for subscriber and therefore try and capture as much network resource as possible to deliver it. Browser / apps / phone manufacturers also assume that more speed equals better user experience, therefore try to commandeer as much capacity as possible. A reaction to operators trying to perform traffic management functions is to encrypt traffic to obfuscate it. 

The flaw here is the assumption that the optimum is the product of many maxima self-regulated by an equal and fair apportioning of resources. This shows a complete ignorance of how networks are designed, how they operate and how traffic flows through these networks.

This behavior leads to a network where resources can be in contention and all end-points vie for priority and maximum resource allocation. From this perspective one can understand that there is no such thing as "net neutrality" at least not in wireless networks. 

When network resources are over-subscribed, decisions are taken as to who gets more capacity, priority, speed... The question becomes who should be in position to make these decisions. Right now, the laissez-faire approach to net neutrality means that the network is not managed, it is subjected to traffic. When in contention, resources are managing traffic based on obscure rules in load balancers, routers, base stations, traffic management engines... This approach is the result of lazy, surface thinking. Net neutrality should be the opposite of non-intervention. Its rules should be applied equally to networks, devices / apps/browsers and content providers if what we want to enable is fair and equal access to resources.

Now, who said access to wireless should be fair and equal? Unless the networks are nationalized and become government assets, I do not see why private companies, in a competitive market couldn't manage their resources in order to optimize their utilization.

If we transport ourselves in a world where all traffic becomes encrypted overnight, networks lose the ability to manage traffic beyond allowing / stopping and fixing high level QoS metrics to specific services. That would lead to network operators being forced to charge exclusively for traffic tonnage. At this point, everyone has to pay per byte transmitted. The cost to users would become prohibitive as more and more video of higher resolution flow through the networks. It would mean also that these video providers could asphyxiate the other services... More importantly, it would mean that the user experience would become the fruit of the fight between content providers' ability to monopolize network capacity, which would go again any net neutrality's principles. A couple of content providers could dominate not only service but the access to these service as well.

The problem is that encryption makes most traffic management and lawful interception provisions extremely unlikely or at the least very inefficient. Privacy is an important facet of net neutrality's advocates' discourse. It is indeed the main reason many content and service providers are invoking for encrypting traffic. In many case, this might be a true concern, but it is hard to reconcile that with the fact that many provide encryption keys and certificates to third party networks or CDNs for instance to improve caching ratios, perform edge packaging or advertising insertion. There is nothing that would prevent this model to be extended to wireless networks to perform similar operations. Commercial interest has so far prevented these types of models to emerge.

If encryption continues to grow, and service providers deny to operators the capability to decrypt traffic, the traditional burden of lawful interception might be transferred to the former. Since many providers are transnational, what is defined as lawful interception is unlikely to be unenforceable. At this stage we might have to choose, as societies between digital security or privacy.
In all likeliness, though, one can hope that regulatory bodies will up their technical game and understand the nature of digital traffic in the 21st century. This should lead to lawful interception mandate being applicable equally to all parts of the delivery chain, which will force collaborative behavior between the actors. 

SDN-NFV in wireless 2015/2016 is released

As previously announced, I have been working on my new report "SDN-NFV in wireless 2015/2016" and I happy to announce its release.

The report features primary and secondary research on the state of SDN and NFV standards and open source, together with an analysis of the most advanced network operators and solutions vendors in the space.

You can download the table of contents here.

Released September 2015
130 pages

• Operators strategy and deployments review: AT&T, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, Telecom Italy, Telefonica, ...

• Vendors strategy and roadmap review: Affirmed networks, ALU, Cisco, Ericsson, F5, HP, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Oracle, Red Hat...

• Drivers for SDN and NFV in telecom networks 
• Public, private, hybrid, specialized clouds 
• Review of SDN and NFV standards and open source initiatives
• SDN 
• Service chaining
• Apache CloudStack, Microsoft Cloud OS, Red Hat, Citrix CloudPlatform, OpenStack, VMWare vCloud, 
• SDN controllers (OpenDaylight, ONOS) 
• SDN protocols (OpenFlow, NETCONF, ForCES, YANG...)
• NFV 
• ETSI ISG NFV 
• OPNFV 
• OpenMANO 
• NFVRG 
• MEF LSO 
• Hypervisors: VMWare vs. KVM, vs Containers
• How does it all fit together? 
• Core and RAN networks NFV roadmap

Terms and conditions: message me at patrick.lopez@coreanalysis.ca

What we can learn from ETSI ISG NFV PoCs

This post is extracted from my report SDN - NFV in Wireless.

Last year’s report had a complete review of all ETSI NFV proof of concepts, their participants, aim and achievements. This year, I propose a short statistical analysis of the 38 PoCs proposed to date. This analysis provides some interesting insights on where the NFV challenges stand today and who are the active participants in their resolution.

• 21 service providers participate in 38 PoCs at ETSI NFV
• 36% of service providers are in EMEA and responsible for 52% of trials, 41% in APAC, responsible for 25% of trials and 23% in North America, responsible for 23% of trials.

Out of 38 PoCs, only 31% have seen an active participation from one or several operators, the rest of the PoCs have seen operators take a back seat and either lend their name to the process (at least one operator must be involved for a PoC to be validated) or provide high level requirements and feedback. The most active operators have been Deutsche Telekom and NTT, but only on the first PoCs in 2014. After that operator’s participation has been spotty, suggesting that those heavily involved at the beginning of the process have moved on to private PoCs and trials. Since the Q1 2015, 50% of PoCs see direct operator involvement, ranging from Orchestration, NFVI or VIM with operators who are mostly new to NFV, suggesting a second wave of service providers are getting into the fray with a more hands-on approach.

Figure 36: Operators activity in PoC

Out of the 52 operators participating in the 38 Pocs, Telefonica, AT&T and BT, DT, NTT, Vodafone account for 62% of all PoCs, while other operators have only been involved in one PoC or are just starting. Telefonica has been the most active overall, but with all of its involvement in 2014, no new PoC participation in 2015. AT&T has been involved throughout 2014 and has only recently restarted a PoC in 2015. British Telecom has been the most regular since the start of the program with in average close to one PoC per quarter.

Figure 37: ETSI NFV PoC operators’ participation

On the vendors’ front, 87 vendors and academic institutions have participated to date to the PoCs, led by HP and Intel (found respectively in 8% of PoCs). The second tier of participants includes, in descending order, Brocade, Alcatel Lucent, Huawei, red hat and Cisco, who are represented in between 5 and 3% of the PoCs. Overwhelmingly, in 49% of the cases, vendors participated to only one PoC.

The most interesting statistics in my mind is showing that squarely half of the PoCs are using SDN for virtual networking or VIM and the same proportion (but not necessarily the same PoCs) have deployed a VNF orchestrator in some form.

Citrix selling Bytemobile

In a press release dated July 28, Citrix Systems has announced that it will collaborate with Elliott Management, an activist investment firm who has amassed 7.1% of the company's common stock and has been advocating for strategic changes in Citrix' product portfolio and operations.

Elliott had announced their plans to actively be involved in Citrix' strategy in a letter to their board on June 11. The letter laid out a plan for Citrix' stock growth and investor value creation including executive and operational changes, as well as spin off or sale of business units, including ByteMobile, acquired for $435m in 2012.
Citrix has announced that they have retained financial advisors for the sale of ByteMobile.

Concurrent with the announcement that Citrix will collaborate with Elliott and give them a board seat, Citrix' CEO has announced his retirement effective as soon as a replacement is found.

Announcing SDN / NFV in wireless 2015

On the heels of my presentation at the NFV world congress in San Diego this spring, my presentation and panels at LTE world summit on network visualization and my anticipated participation at SDN & OpenFlow world Summit in the fall, I am happy to announce production for "SDN / NFV in wireless networks 2015".

This report, to be released in September, will feature my review of the progress of SDN and NFV as technologies transitioning from PoC to commercial trials and limited deployments in wireless networks.

The report provides a step by step strategy for introducing SDN and NFV in your product and services development.

• Drivers for SDN and NFV in telecom networks 
• Public, private, hybrid, specialized clouds 
• Review of SDN and NFV standards and open source initiatives
• SDN 
• Service chaining
• Apache CloudStack, Microsoft Cloud OS, Red Hat, Citrix CloudPlatform, OpenStack,  VMWare vCloud, 
• SDN controllers (OpenDaylight, ONOS) 
• SDN protocols (OpenFlow, NETCONF, ForCES, YANG...)
• NFV 
• ETSI ISG NFV 
• OPNFV 
• OpenMANO 
• NFVRG 
• MEF LSO 
• Hypervisors: VMWare vs. KVM, vs Containers
• How does it all fit together? 
• Core and RAN networks NFV roadmap
• Operators strategy and deployments review: AT&T, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, Telecom Italy, Telefonica, Verizon...
• Vendors strategy and roadmap review: Affirmed networks, ALU, Cisco, Ericsson, F5, HP, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, Oracle, Red Hat... 

Can't wait for the report? Want more in-depth and personalized training? A 5 hours workshop and strategy session is available now to answer your specific questions and help you chart your product and services roadmap, while understanding your competitors' strategy and progress.

Data traffic optimization feature set

Data traffic optimization in wireless networks has reached a mature stage as a technology . The innovations that have marked the years 2008 – 2012 are now slowing down and most core vendors exhibit a fairly homogeneous feature set. 

The difference comes in the implementation of these features and can yield vastly different results, depending on whether vendors are using open source or purpose-built caching or transcoding engines and whether congestion detection is based on observed or deduced parameters.

Vendors tend nowadays to differentiate on QoE measurement / management, monetization strategies including content injection, recommendation and advertising.

Here is a list of commonly implemented optimization techniques in wireless networks.

•  TCP optimization
• Buffer bloat management
• Round trip time management
• Web optimization
• GZIP
•  JPEG / PNG… transcoding
• Server-side JavaScript
• White space / comments… removal
• Lossless optimization
• Throttling / pacing
• Caching
• Adaptive bit rate manipulation
• Manifest mediation
• Rate capping
• Lossy optimization
• Frame rate reduction
• Transcoding
• Online
• Offline
• Transrating
• Contextual optimization
• Dynamic bit rate adaptation
• Device targeted optimization
• Content targeted optimization
• Rule base optimization
• Policy driven optimization
• Surgical optimization / Congestion avoidance
• Congestion detection
• TCP parameters based
• RAN explicit indication
• Probe based
• Heuristics combination based
• Encrypted traffic management
• Encrypted traffic analytics
• Throttling / pacing
• Transparent proxy
• Explicit proxy
• QoE measurement
• Web
• page size
• page load time (total)
• page load time (first rendering)
• Video
• Temporal measurements
• Time to start
• Duration loading
• Duration and number of buffering interruptions
• Changes in adaptive bit rates
• Quantization
• Delivery MOS
• Spatial measurements
• Packet loss
• Blockiness
• Blurriness
• PSNR / SSIM
• Presentation MOS

An explanation of each technology and its feature set can be obtained as part of the mobile video monetization report series or individually as a feature report or in a workshop.

Video interview at MWC15 by Qosmos on SDN and NFV in wireless

Short interview by Qosmos on the state of SDN & NFV in wireless networks in 2015.

OTT as MVNO… or MNOs

This is an excerpt from my latest report "Video monetization 2015" .

OTT providers on their side might have some slightly different plans and views from mobile network operators. Most of them have built a business predominantly digital, based on internet-based delivery and had had to navigate the intricacies of creating an ecosystem (content creation, aggregation, distribution,…) and a business model (free, freemium, ad sponsored, hybrid, subscription, sponsored…) for the internet. 

This effort has resulted in partnerships and value chains, where content delivery is a little part of the value and when third parties like CDN can’t provide suitable or economical service levels, they are replaced by homegrown solutions, as illustrated by Netflix and Google’s caching strategy.

As a result, I believe that Google’s SVP products Sundar Pichai’s announcement at mobile world congress 2015 is likely to be a sea change. The company has decided to put rumors of becoming an MVNO to bed by integrating vertically the value chain one step further. The company will launch a MVNO service in the US, probably on Sprint and/or T-Mobile networks, blending cellular and wi-fi coverage. It starts to look increasingly like the dystopian future described here.

It is very likely that Google being who they are, will be looking at extending their services to mobile in a very different fashion than a mobile network operator. One can muse that in all likeliness, a Google subscriber (!?) with an Android device on YouTube or G+ is unlikely to pay for minutes of voice or Megabytes of data. It is likely that this first attempt to translate the very basics of mobile network economics into an ad sponsored model will have a very disruptive and durable effect on the whole value chain.

If you remember, this is not the only initiative that Google has with mobile networks. Since 2013, the company has been exploring the possibility to build and operate wireless networks in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. If you put this with the recent announcement that Telstra in Australia, Vodafone in New Zealand and Telefonica in South America have all agreed to participate in live trials of the Loon project, it is likely that Google will look at being increasingly involve in cellular networks. The project now supports LTE and balloons can stay up for about 6 months. 

Driving the nail farther in operator’s coffins, Mark Zuckergerg at the same show was advocating for Facebook’s initiative internet.org that is promoting free mobile internet access in emerging countries. The rationale here is that free internet promotes usage, which promotes engagement, which promotes new revenues. Current experiments in Millicom Paraguay or Tanzania, saw increases of data users by the tune of 30% and 10x increase in smartphone sales.

All in all, OTT providers have fundamentally different view of services and value different things than mobile network operators. The reconciliation of these views and the emergence of a new coherent business model will be painful but necessary.

More on the subject, as well as strategies from OTT and mobile network operators to monetize video in "Video monetization 2015". 

MWC15 newslist

If You have been struggling to keep up to date with all the announcements and releases at Mobile World Congress last week, here is the list of what has caught my eye from the companies I follow or I have met in the domain of video monetization and SDN / NFV.
As usual, interviews, trajectory, strategy and analysis in my upcoming report on "Mobile video monetization 2015".

Allot Communications

Allot Launches SmartEngage Enabling Mobile Operators to Increase Subscriber Service Uptake
Allot Communications to Acquire Operations of Optenet, a Leading Security-as-a-Service Solution Provider
Allot MobileTrends Report Reveals Security-as-a-Service is a Clear Revenue Generator for CSPs

Avvasi

Avvasi Joins Forces with Intel^® Network Builders Program

Avvasi Announces Virtualized XperiumOS™ at MWC 2015

Brocade

Brocade to Acquire Connectem; Extends Leadership in New IP to Mobile Networks

Cisco

Global Service Providers Transform Networks and Business Services with Cisco at Mobile World Congress 2015

Citrix

Citrix Introduces Next-Generation Carrier-Grade NetScaler for Communications Service Providers

Ericsson

Ericsson joins top global players to drive LTE Broadcast at Mobile World Congress 2015Ericsson selected as solution partner for Network Virtualization platform and Cloud Manager by NTT DOCOMOEricsson and Telefonica extend successful co-operation for Network Virtualization

Flash Networks

FLASH NETWORKS ANNOUNCES NEW CONGESTION-BASED OPTIMIZATION AND ACCELERATION FOR ENCRYPTED MOBILE TRAFFICFLASH NETWORKS INNOVATIVE LAYER8 MONETIZATION SOLUTION SELECTED BY SEVEN OPERATORS IN THE LAST SIX MONTHSVIP MOBILE SELECTS FLASH NETWORKS’ HARMONY™ 7.5 TO ENHANCE VIDEO VIEWING AND BOOST BROWSING SPEEDSFLASH NETWORKS SIGNS MOU WITH NOKIA NETWORKS FOR MOBILE MONETIZATION

Huawei

Huawei Collaborates with Intel to Deliver Public Cloud Solutions for Global Telecom Carriers
Huawei Redefines Hybrid Clouds with FusionCloud Omni Solution
Huawei Releases Industry’s First High Throughput Router (HTR) for an Optimized Ultra-HD Video Experience

Nokia

Orange, Nokia Networks team up on Telco Cloud

Openwave Mobility

Openwave Mobility Unveils Subscriber Data Federation SolutionOpenwave Mobility First to Optimize Encrypted Video StreamingOpenwave Mobility Named Fastest Growing Video Optimization Player

Opera

Encrypted video traffic now optimized by OperaNew revenues in sight for operators as Opera launches cross-browser monetization solution

NEC

NEC enhances Traffic Management Solution that maximizes ROI for communication service providersNEC and F5 Networks form traffic management partnership

Procera Networks

Procera Networks’ NAVL Engine Powers Connectem vEPC for Telekom Austria Group
Roundbox
Procera Networks Deployed for Video Analytics by Tier 1 Broadband Operator
Procera Networks Partners with Dell for COTS NFV Solutions
ETSI NFV Proof of Concept Demonstrates Virtualized Real-Time OSS/BSS

Saguna Networks

SoftBank Ventures and Akamai Technologies make a strategic investment in Saguna Networks
Saguna Expands Open-RAN Platform Bringing CDNs, Content Caching and OTTs Together in the Mobile Radio Edge
Akamai and Saguna Win Best Innovation based on Network Intelligence Award at #MWC15
Telefonica

Vantrix

Kontron and Vantrix Smash DSP Cost and Performance Barriers With Network Functions Virtualization Speech Transcoding Solution
Vantrix Showcases Network Functions Virtualization Optimization Solution with HP at Mobile World Congress 2015
Vantrix to Demo Ultra-High-Density Media Optimization and Speech Processing at Mobile World Congress 2015

Vasona Networks

Vasona Networks Tackles Congestion Management Issues Caused By Rise Of Encrypted Traffic On Mobile Networks

Mobile video 2015 executive summary

As is now traditional, I return from Mobile World Congress with a head full of ideas and views on market evolution, fueled by dozens of meetings and impromptu discussions. The 2015 mobile video monetization report, now in its fourth year, reflects the trends and my analysis of the mobile video market, its growth, opportunities and challenges.

Here is the executive summary from the report to be released this month.

2014 has been a contrasted year for deployments of video monetization platforms in mobile networks. The market in deployments and value has grown, but there has been an unease that has gripped some of its protagonists, forcing exits and pivot strategies, while players with new value proposition have emerged. This transition year is due to several factors.

On the growth front, we have seen the emergence of MVNOs and interconnect / clearing houses as a buying target, together with the natural turnover and replacement of now aging and fully amortized platforms deployed 5/6 years ago.

Additionally, the market leaders upgrade strategies have naturally also created some space for challengers and new entrants. Mature markets have seen mostly replacements and MVNO green field deployments, while emerging markets have added new units in markets that are either too early for 3G or already saturated in 4G. Volume growth has been particularly sustained in Eastern / Central Europe, North Africa, Middle East and South East Asia.

On the other hand, the emergence and growth of traffic encryption, coupled with persisting legal and regulatory threat surrounding the net neutrality debate has cooled down, delayed and in some cases shut down optimization projects as operators are trying to rethink their options. Western Europe and North America have seen a marked slowdown, while South America is just about starting to show interest.

The value of the deals has been in line with last year, after sharp erosions due to the competitive environment. The leading vendors have consolidated their approach, taken on new strategies and overall capitalizing on installed base, while many new deals have gone to new entrants and market challengers.

2014 has also been the first year of a commercial public cloud deployment, which should be followed soon by others. Network function virtualization has captivated many network operators’ imagination and science experiment budget, which has prompted the emergence of the notion of traffic classification and management as a service.

Video streaming, specifically, has shown great growth in 2014, consolidating its place as the fastest growing service in mobile networks and digital content altogether. 2014 and early 2015 have seen many acquisitions of video streaming, packaging, encoding technology company. What is new however, is that a good portion of these acquisitions were not performed by other technology companies but by OTT such as FaceBook and Twitter.

Mobile video advertising is starting to become a “thing” again, as investments, inventory and views show triple digit growth. The trend shows mobile video advertising becoming possibly the single largest revenue opportunity for mobile operators within a 5 years timeframe, but its implementation demands a change in attitude, organization, approach that is alien to most operators DNA. The transformation, akin to a heart transplant will probably leave many dead on the operating table before the graft takes on and the technique is refined, but they might not have much choice, looking at Google’ and Facebook’s announcements at Mobile World Congress 2015.

Will new technologies such as LTE Multicast, for instance, which are due to make their start in earnest this year, promising quality assured HD content, via streaming or download, be able to unlock the value chain? 

The mobile industry is embattled and find itself looking at some great threats to its business model, as the saying goes, those who will survive are not necessarily the strongest, but rather those who will adapt the fastest.

The future is cloudy: NFV 2020 part II

I have received some comments after my previous post arguing that maybe the future of SDN and NFV is not as far as I am predicting. As we are all basking in the pre Mobile World Congress excitement, inundated by announcements from vendors and operators alike trying to catch the limelight before the deafening week begins, I thought I would clarify some of my thoughts.

We have seen already this week some announcements of virtualization plans, products and even deployments.

One of the main problems with a revolutionary approach such SDN and/or NFV implementation is that it suggests a complete network overhaul to deliver its full benefits. In all likeliness, no network operator is able to operate fully these kind of changes in less than a 10 years' timescale, so what to do first?

The choice is difficult, since there are a few use cases that seem easy enough to roll out but deliver little short term benefits (vCPE, some routing and switching functions...) while the projects that should deliver the highest savings, the meaty ones, seem quite far from maturity (EPC, IMS, c-RAN...). Any investment on this front is going to be just that...an investment with little to no return in the short term.

The problem is particularly difficult to solve because most of the value associated with virtualization of mobile networks in the short term is supposedly ties to capex and opex savings. I have previously highlighted this trend and it is not abating, more like accelerating.

Islands of SDN or NFV implementations in a sea of legacy network elements is not going to generate much saving. It could arguably generate new revenue streams if these were used to launch new services, but today’s focus has been so far to emulate and translate physical function and networks into virtualized ones, with little effort in term of new service creation.

As a result, the business case to deploy SDN or NFV in a commercial network today is negative and likely to stay so for the next few years. I expect the momentum to continue, though, since it will have to work and to deliver the expected savings for network operators to stand a chance to stay in business.

The other side of this coin is the service offering.  While flexibility, time to market and capacity to launch new services are always quoted as some of the benefits of network virtualization, it seems that many operators have given up on innovation and service creation. The examples of new services are few and far between and I would hope that these would be the object of more focused efforts.

At last, it seems that maybe one of my previsions will be fulfilled shortly, a friend pointed out that this year's GSMA freebee for its member at the show will be... a selfie stick.