Policy driven optimization

The video optimization market is still young, but with over 80 mobile networks deployed globally, I am officially transitioning it from emerging to growth phase in the technology life cycle matrix.


Mobile world congress brought many news in that segment, from new entrants, to networks announcements, technology launches and new partnerships. I think one of the most interesting trend is in the policy and charging management for video.


Operators understand that charging models based on pure data consumption are doomed to be hard to understand for users and to be potentially either extremely inefficient or expensive. In a world where a new iPad can consume a subscriber's data plan in a matter of hours, while the same subscriber could be watching 4 to 8 times the same amount of video on a different device, the one-size-fits-all data plan is a dangerous proposition.


While the tool set to address the issue is essentially in place, with intelligent GGSNs, EPCs, DPIs, PCRFs and video delivery and optimization engine, this collection of devices were mostly managing their portion of traffic in a very disorganized fashion. Access control at the radio and transport layer segregated from protocol and application, accounting separated from authorization and charging...
Policy control is the technology designed to unify them and since this market's inception, has been doing a good job of coordinating access control, accounting, charging, rating and permissions management for voice and data.


What about video?
The diameter Gx interface is extensible, as a semantics to convey traffic observations and decisions between one or several policy decision points and policy enforcement points. The standards allows for complex iterative challenges between end points to ascertain a session's user, its permissions and balance as he uses cellular services. 
Video was not a dominant part of the traffic when the policy frameworks were put in place, and not surprisingly, the first generation PCRFs and video optimization deployments were completely independent. Rules had to be provisioned and maintained in separate systems, because the PCRF was not video aware and the video optimization platforms were not policy aware.
This led to many issues, ranging from poor experience (DPI instructed to throttle traffic below the encoding rate of a video), bill shock (ill-informed users blow past their data allowance) to revenue leakage (poorly designed charging models not able to segregate the different HTTP traffic).


The next generation networks see a much tighter integration between policy decision and policy enforcement for the delivery of video in mobile networks. Many vendors in both segments collaborate and have moved past the pure interoperability testing to deployments in commercial networks. Unfortunately, we have not seen many proof points of these integration yet. Mostly, it is due to the fact that this is an emerging area. Operators are still trying to find the right recipe for video charging. Standards do not offer guidance for specific video-related policies. Vendors have to rely on two-ways (proprietary?) implementations.


Lately, we have seen the leaders in policy management  and video optimization collaborate much closer to offer solutions in this space. In some cases, as the result of being deployed in the same networks and being "forced" to integrate gracefully, in many cases, because the market enters a new stage of maturation. As you well know, I have been advocating a closer collaboration between DPI, policy management and video optimization for a while (here, here and here for instance). I think these are signs of market maturation that will accelerate concentration in that space. There are more and more rumors of  video optimization vendors getting closer to mature policy vendors. It is a logical conclusion for operators to get a better integrated traffic management and charging management ecosystem centered around video going forward. I am looking forward to discussing these topics and more at Policy Control 2012 in Amsterdam, April 24-25.

Need an IT manager for my connected home!

I am not really an early adopter. I tend to integrate new products and technologies when my needs change.
Until recently, my electronic devices were dumb and mute, just performing what I wanted to, either working or not.

In this new era of hyper connected homes though, everything becomes exponentially more complex as you add more connected devices. Since I have started my business, I had also to use cloud-based apps and services to expand my brick-and-mortar tools.
Now, with two desktops, a laptop, a tablet, two smartphones, a connected PVR, a PS3 and countless accounts and services from Dropbox, Youtube, Netflix, Google apps, Tweeter, Blogger... it does not take much to see how how these devices, interacting with all these apps and data points can quickly start conflicting with each other.
Especially when you layer that these devices communicate over LAN, Wifi, Bluetooth, RF, IR...
Add as well surveillance camera and energy management modules in the future and complex becomes complicated.

UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) usually do a good job of device discovery. Service and content discovery and priority setting is where it starts to get tricky.
Here are a few of the problems I had to face or am still facing in this hyper connected world.

Authentication and handover:
I use Rogers as a service provider for one of my smartphones. I use their self-help app to manage my bill, my subscription and travel packages. One of the things that is truly a problem is that it works only on a cellular network. Most of the times I need to use it is when I am travelling to add or remove a travel pack for voice, data or text. Because of the expensive roaming data rates, it does not make sense to connect while roaming just to enable a feature that saves me the roaming costs. Obviously, Rogers has not enabled Wifi - cellular authentication and credentials handover.

Authorization and software version control:
I am a Bell subscriber for TV and internet at home. I was excited when I received an email showing off Bell's new mobile TV and companion screen apps for my iPhone / iPad. I was less excited when my iPhone, on rogers network could not use Bell's content, even though I am a Bell customer. Too bad, but I thought at least I could use the PVR remote control with my iPad on Bell's network. Does not work either, because I would have to upgrade my PVR. A PVR, I am renting from Bell. You would think it would be possible for them to know what PVR I am using and therefore allow me to re flash the software to avail of new capabilities or try to up sell me to the latest new PVR and features...

Credentials management
At some point, security relents before complexity. When you want to run a secure network across several interfaces and devices, managing credentials with associated permissions becomes tricky. You have to find a way to have credentials that can easily be shared, remaining secure while managing what device has access to what dataset under which conditions.

Connectivity, content discovery  and sharing:
Inevitably, users buy new devices and add up capabilities along the way. The flip side of that coin, though is that it makes for a very heterogeneous environment. When you start having several devices with similar capabilities or overlaps, you want them to function with each other seamlessly. For instance, my old desktop running XP cannot easily join the workgroup of my new desktop and laptop running windows 7.
There are solutions, but none of them straightforward enough for a regular user. A last example is the fact that my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, my PVR, my 2 desktops and my PS3 to some extend all act as media servers. They all have local content and they all access content from the cloud, the internet or local content stored in other devices. Again, I haven't found a solution yet that would allow me to manage and share content across devices with clear permission management. Additionally, there is no search or recommendation engine that would allow me to perform meta search across 1) my local content on several devices 2) the internet and OTT content providers and apps I am using 3) the electronic programming guide of my set top box and present me a choice like: do you want to watch boardwalk empire Sunday at 9 pm on HBO, now on HBO Go, buy the entire season on Amazon or play the episodes from my PVR or media servers.

Compatibility:
Too often, i have to transcode videos or change content format to ensure that I can see them on all my screens. This leads to multiple versions of the same content, with associated discoverability and version control issues. Another example is around contact management. It is incredible that Apple still does not get contact management right. If you enable iCloud and have your contacts synchronized with anything that is not apple (Google contacts or linked in) you end up with endless duplicates contacts with no hope to merge and delete without adding on new expensive apps.

Control and management:
It strikes me that with that many connected devices and apps, I have not found yet a single dashboard giving me visibility, control and management of all my devices, allowing me to allocate bandwidth, and permissions for sharing data and content across platforms.

I think at the end of the day, this field is still emerging and while it is possible to have a good implementation when purchasing a solution from scratch from a single vendor or service provider, assembling a solution organically as you add new devices is likely to have you spend hours deciphering DNS and DHCP configurations. I think what is needed in the short term is a gateway platform, acting as middle-ware, indexing and aggregating devices and content, providing a clear dashboard for permissions management and authorization. That gateway could be the set-top-box if it is powerful enough. It would give back to MSO the control they are loosing to OTT if they are willing to integrate and provide a cohesive environment.