All packets are not created equal: why DPI and policy vendors look at video encoding

As we are still contemplating the impact of last week's US ruling on net neutrality, I thought I would attempt today to settle a question I often get in my workshops. Why is DPI insufficient when it comes to video policy enforcement?

Deep packet inspection platforms have evolved from a static rules-based filtering engine to a sophisticated enforcement point allowing packet and protocol classification, prioritization and shaping. Ubiquitous in enterprises and telco networks, they are the jack-of-all-trade of traffic management, allowing such a diverse set of use cases as policy enforcement, adult content filtering, lawful interception, QoS management, peer-to-peer throttling or interdiction, etc...
DPIs rely first on a robust classification engine. It snoops through data traffic and classifies each packet based on port, protocol, interface, origin, destination, etc... The more sophisticated engines go beyond layer 3 and are able to recognize classes of traffic using headers. This classification engine is sufficient for most traffic type inspection, from web browsing to email, from VoIP to video conferencing or peer-to-peer sharing.
The premise, here is that if you can recognize, classify, tag traffic accurately, then you can apply rules governing the delivery of this traffic, ranging from interdiction to authorization, with many variants of shaping in between.

DPI falls short in many cases when it comes to video streaming. Until 2008 or so, most video streaming was relying on specialized protocols such as RTSP. The classification was easy, as the videos were all encapsulated in a specific protocol, allowing instantiation and enforcement of rules in pretty straightforward manner. The emergence and predominance of HTTP based streaming video (progressive download, adaptive streaming and variants) has complicated the task for DPIs. The transport protocol remains the same as general web traffic, but the behaviour is quite different. As we have seen many times in this blog, video traffic must be measured in different manner from generic data traffic, if policy enforcement is to be implemented. All packets are not created equal.

• The first challenge is to recognise that a packet is video. DPIs generally infer the nature of the HTTP packet based on its origin/destination. For instance, they can see that the traffic's origin is YouTube, they can therefore assume that it is video. This is insufficient, not all YouTube traffic is video streaming (when you browse between pages, when you read or post comments, when you upload a video, when you like or dislike...). Applying video rules to browsing traffic or vice versa can have adverse consequences on the user experience.
• The second challenge is policy enforcement. The main tool in DPI arsenal for traffic shaping is setting the delivery bit rate for a specific class of traffic. As we have seen, videos come in many definition (4k, HD, SD, QCIF...), many containers and many formats, resulting in a variety of different encoding bit rate. If you want to shape your video traffic, it is crucial that you know all these elements and the encoding bit rate, because if traffic is throttled below the encoding, rate, then the video stalls and buffers or times out. It is not reasonable to have a one-size-fits-all policy for video (unless it is to forbid usage). In order to extract the video-specific attributes of a session, you need to decode it, which requires in-line transcoding capabilities, even if you do not intend to modify that video.

Herein lies the difficulty. To implement intelligent, sophisticated traffic management rules today, you need to be able handle video. To handle video, you need to recognize it (not infer or assume), and measure it. To recognize and measure it, you need to decode it. This is one of the reasons why Allot bought Ortiva Wireless in 2012, Procera partnered with Skyfire and ByteMobile upgraded their video inspection to full fledged DPI more recently. We will see more generic traffic management vendors (PCRF, PCEF, DPI...) partner and acquire video transcoding companies.

All bytes are not created equal...

Recent discussions with a number of my clients have brought to light a fundamental misconception. Mobile video is not data. It is not a different use case of data or a particular form of data, it is just a different service. The sooner network operators will understand that they cannot count, measure, control video the same way as browsing data, the sooner they will have a chance to integrate the value chain of delivering video.

Deep packet inspection engines count bytes, categorize traffic per protocol, bearer, URL, throttle and prioritize data flow based on rules that are video-myopic. Their concern is of Quality of Service (QoS) not Quality of Experience (QoE). Policy and charging engines decide meter and limit traffic in real-time based on the incomplete picture painted by DPIs and other network elements.

Not understanding whether traffic is video (or assuming it is video just based on the URL) can prove itself catastrophic for the user experience and their bill. How can traffic management engine instantiate video charging and prioritization rules if they cannot differentiate between download, progressive download, adaptive bit rate? How can they decide what is the appropriate bandwidth for a service if they do not understand what is the encoding of the video, what are the available bit rates, if it is HD or SD, what is the user expectation?

Content providers naturally push a content of the highest quality that the network can afford, smartphone and tablets try and grab as much network capacity available at the establishment of a session to guarantee user experience, often at the detriment of other connections / devices. It is wrong to assume that the quality of experience in video is the result of a harmonious negotiation between content, device and networks.
It is actually quite the opposite, each party pulling in their direction with conflicting priorities.
User experience suffers as a result and we have started to see instances of users complaining or churning due to bad video experience.

All bytes are not created equal. Video weighs heavier and has a larger emotional attachment than email or browsing services when it comes to the user's experience of a network's quality. This is one of the subjects I will be presenting at Informa's Mobile Video Global Summit in Berlin, next week.

How to weather signalling storms

I was struck a few months back when I heard an anecdote from Telecom Italia about a signalling storm in their network, bringing unanticipated outages. After investigation, the operator found out that the launch of Angry bird on Android had a major difference with the iOS version. It was a free app monetized through advertisement. Ads were being requested and served between each levels (or retry).
 If you are like me, you can easily go through 10 or more levels (mmmh... retries|) in a minute. Each one of these created a request going to the ad server, which generated queries to the subscriber database, location, charging engine over diameter resulting in +351% diameter traffic.
The traffic generated by one chatty app brought the network to its knees withing days of its launch.

As video traffic congestion becomes more prevalent and we see operators starting to measure subscriber's satisfaction in that area, we have seen several solutions emerge (video optimization, RAN optimization, policy management, HSPA +  and LTE upgrades, new pricing models...).

Signalling congestion, by contrast remains an emerging issue. I sat yesterday with Tekelec's Director of Strategic Marketing, Joanne Steinberg to discuss the topic and what should operators do about it.
Tekelec recently (September 2012) released its LTE Diameter Signalling Index. This report projects that diameter traffic will increase at a +252% CAGR until 2016 from 800k to 46 million messages per second globally. This is due to a radical change in applications behavior, as well as the new pricing and business models put in place by operators. Policy management, QoS management, metered charging, 2 sided business models and M2M traffic are some of the culprits highlighted in the report.

Diameter is a protocol that was invented originally to replace SS7 Radius, for the main purposes of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA). Real time charging and the evolution to IN drove its implementation. The protocol was created to be lighter than Radius, while extensible, with a variety of proprietary fields that could be added for specific uses. Its extensibility was the main criterion for its adoption as the protocol of choice for Policy and Charging functions.
Victim of its success, the protocol is now used in LTE for a variety of tasks ranging from querying subscriber databases (HSS), querying user balance and performing transactional charging and policy traffic.

Tekelec' signaling solutions, together with its policy product line (inherited from the Camiant acquisition), provides a variety of solution to handle the increasing load of diameter signaling traffic and is proposing its "Diameter Signaling Router as a means to manage, throttle, load balance and route diameter traffic".

In my opinion, data browsing is less predictable than voice or messaging traffic when it comes to signalling. While in the past a message at the establishment of the session, one at the end and optionally a few interim updates were sufficient, today sophisticated business models and price plans require a lot of signalling traffic. Additionally, diameter starts to be used to extend outside of the core packet network towards the RAN (for RAN optimization) and towards the internet (for OTT 2 sided business models). OTT content and app providers do not understand the functioning of mobile networks and we cannot expect device and app signalling traffic to self-regulate. While some 3GPP effort is expended to evaluate new architectures and rules such as fast dormancy, the problem is likely to grow faster than the standards' capacity to contain  it. I believe that diameter management and planning is necessary for network operators who are departing from all-you-can eat data plans and policy-driven traffic and charging models.

Sprint kills two birds

There is little doubt in my mind, that someone woke up at Sprint one morning and looked at their current position and strategy and thought:

• Launched iPhone, check,
• Introduced all-you-can-eat unlimited data plan, check,
• Launch 4G, check, 
• ...wow that feels pretty good... 

That is until someone must have asked "Who are our suppliers of mobile internet technology who we will be relying on to grow drastically our capacity and services while reducing our costs?".


The answer was probably, "the same vendors whom we have relied on for 2G and 3G, Openwave and Ortiva Wireless"... Well, the market had changed and as the execs looked at the viability of their current suppliers, they probably accelerated their exit by selecting a new vendor. Sprint has been rumored to have selected Bytemobile last month, after a short evaluation. 


As you have seen, Ortiva got scooped up by Allot, a good operation for the vendor who has been wanting to expand their offering for the last eighteen months. The company was looking for good technology, at a low price, and that is exactly what they got. 


Ortiva Wireless has been one of the first pure play video optimization vendors, focusing on transrating and dynamic bit rate adaptation. A narrow field that allowed it to focus and execute well technically, on a few deployments, but lacked the breadth to challenge vendors with a more complete offering. The company never got the critical mass to grow organically fast enough, and when the news hit, last month, that Sprint, their largest customer was looking at alternative vendors for 4G,  the investors, who have put in over $40m in equity and convertible debt decided to look for alternative growth strategy. Allot had been in the market for a while for a video optimization vendor and the deal was concluded in a few weeks, for less than $16m.


The following week, Sandvine announces a joint video optimization  deployment with Mobixell at nTelos. Bytemobile had already started communicating (here) around policy-based optimization at mobile world congress, with Openet.


As for Openwave, if you have followed the saga (here), you will  not have been surprised to learn that after a few weeks of due diligence with a couple of possible suitors, the company decided to continue licensing its patent portfolio under the name "Unwired Planet" while divesting its product divisions split between Openwave Messaging and Openwave Mobility to Marlin Equity Partners for $55m.It is too bad that the strategic relationship with Juniper did not develop into an acquisition, but it is hardly surprising, considering Openwave's market share and technical results in video optimization.


Meanwhile, as Comviva, NSN, OnMobile, and Huawei enter the segment with their in-house and OEM'd technology, Alcatel Lucent, Amdocs, Cisco and others have selected partners for VAR and OEM and are actively participating in vendors' evaluations. 


These subjects and many more at the Mobile Video Optimization forum in Brussels June 12-13th. I am the show's official blogger and will chair day 1. I am looking forward to seeing you there.

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.

Connexus: Avvasi, BroadHop, CommProve and Spirent Communications

On October 11, Avvasi, BroadHop, CommProve and Spirent Communications announced the creation of Connexus in a press release, an ecosystem for monetizing OTT.

Personally, I am fairly skeptical about the capacity for anyone to monetize free OTT, besides the content owners and aggregators themselves, so I called up Mate Prgin, president and CEO of Avvasi to get a little detail on this new initiative.


"We are all familiar with the take off of video in wireless networks, and how OTT is a large part of this. Optimization techniques have been used today mostly in a defensive manner, to keep costs down and are necessary but really only a band aid.

Today's main issue is is to align revenues with costs. Operator's best asset is the last mile, ensuring connectivity and quality of experience (QOE). It should allow them to monetize this service to announcers and content providers" started Mate.  He agreed, when pressed that in the short term, monetization opportunities will be mostly around premium content and services.

Connexus is an initiative to catalyze and accelerate the process for the creation of a standard that would offer a framework between operators and content owners to trade content delivery revenue vs. QOE guarantees. Last-mile QOE, traffic management, QOE testing, Policy management are all in the scope."This is  not a co-marketing exercise", says Mate. Today, the initiative spearheaded by the 4 founding companies presents blueprint, use cases and roadmap for monetizing OTT, with planned trials and proof of concept early in 2012.


While these documents are available under NDA for these companies' prospects, Connexus is open to new members and is actively talking with 4 new applicants.

While I don't follow 100% some of the premises, I have been a vocal supporter of new standards to be created in the area of traffic management. In my mind, as video becomes business critical and demand outstrips capacity in mobile networks, we need a mechanism to relay congestion and capacity information from the RAN, to the core and the backhaul to enable some meaningful negotiation of network capacity. If in the meantime, it leads to some monetization of the delivery, good for the network operators, but I think we are still very far from the operators being able to guarantee strong SLA-backed QOE to content providers.


This initiative  will need a lot more support from larger names to be effective and provide relevance in the global ecosystem. I also doubt it can succeed without bringing the content owners and aggregators themselves into the discussion. It is a step in the right direction, though and it is good to see companies starting to talk about monetization, rather than savings when it comes to OTT. It will be interesting to follow how operators and large equipment vendors react to Connexus. I am hearing more announcements will follow at Mobile World Congress.

Openet's Intelligent Video Management Solution

As you well know, I have been advocating closer collaboration between DPI,   policy management and video optimization for a while (here and here for instance). 


In my mind, most carriers have had to deal in majority with transactional traffic in data until video came along. There are some fundamental differences between managing transactional and flow-based data traffic.The quality of experience of a video service depends as much from the intrinsic quality of the video than the way that video is being delivered.


In a mobile network, with a daisy chain of proxies and gateways (GGSN, DPI, browsing gateway, video optimization engine, caching systems...), the user experience of a streamed video is only going to be as good as the lowest common denominator of that delivery chain.

Gary Rieschick, Director – Wireless and Broadband Solutions at Openet spoke with me today about the Intelligent Video Management Solution launched this week.

"Essentially, as operators are investing in video optimization solutions, they have been asking how to manage video delivery across separate enforcement points. Some vendors are supporting Gx, other are supporting proprietary extensions or proprietary protocols. Some of these vendors have created quality of experience metrics as well, that are used locally, for static rule based video optimization."

Openet has been working with two vendors in the video optimization space to try and harmonize video optimization methods with policy management. For instance, depending on the resulting quality of a video after optimization, the PCRF could decide to zero rate that video if the quality was below a certain threshold.


The main solution features highlighted by Gary are below:

• Detection of premium content: The PCRF can be aware of agreements between the content provider and operator and provisioned with rules to prioritize or provide better quality to certain content properties.
• Content prioritization: based on time of day, congestion detection
• Synchronization of rules across policy enforcement points to ensure for instance that the throttling engine at the DPI level and at the video optimization engine level do not clash.
• Next hop routing, where the PCRF can instruct the DPI to toute the traffic within the operator network based on what the traffic is (video, mail, P2P...)
• Dynamic policies to supplement and replace static rules provision in video optimization engine to be reactive to network congestion indications, subscriber profile, etc...

I think it is a good step taken by Openet to take some thought leadership in this space. Operators need help to create a carefully orchestrated delivery chain for video. 
While Openet's solution might work well with a few vendors, i think though, that a real industry effort in standardization is necessary to provide video specific extensions to Gx policy interface.
Delivering and optimizing video in a wireless network results in destructive user experience whenever the control plane enabling feedback on congestion, original video quality, resulting video quality, device and network capabilities is not shared across all policy enforcement and policy decision points.

Bytemobile T 3000 series & Unison update

Bytemobile released this week a new platform (T3000) and a new product (T3100).
With more than 40 operator deployments, Bytemobile is the leader in the video optimization market. The new platform is launched to allow Bytemobile to address the intelligent traffic management market .

Mikko Disini, in charge of the new T 3OOO series and Unison platforms discussed with me the rationale behind the introduction of the new product and how it complements Unison.

T3000 series has been created in an effort to provide more monetization options for mobile broadband operators. For those familiar with Unison, which is essentially a web and video proxy and optimization gateway, T3100 expands beyond browsing to proxy and manipulate all traffic, including UDP based applications, P2P, video chat, RTSP, etc..
While Unison remains a software based solution, on off-the-shelf IBM blade center, T3000  series is a purpose built IBM hardware based appliance. T3100 combines load balancing, DPI, PCEF and traffic rules in one package. Bytemobile is planning to introduce new products on the T3000 platform in the future.

Mikko commented that the rationale behind the hardware based approach is to be more channel-friendly. " It is easier to deploy, package, explain, it is an easier sale".

My opinion is that Bytemobile makes a smart move to expand their product portfolio with new verticals. While there is a large level of overlap between Unison and T3100 today, Bytemobile can upsell their installed base with purpose-built solutions. While in the past, Unison was a Swiss Army knife, for a market who was looking for a quick solution, that had a bit of everything, the growth of the traffic is forcing many vendors to separate applications to have more granular scalability.


With T3000, Bytemobile moves more decidedly into the DPI, load balancing, PCEF space than with Unison. Additionally, moving to a hardware appliance model is going to enable them further to resist price erosion, reusing the Unison tactics of bundling several applications and features together with different market prices and models.
What remains to be seen is how effective the strategy is going to be in acquiring new channels, beyond IBM, NSN and TechMahindra now that T3000 is sure to encroach on some bigger players such as F5 and Cisco... or maybe, this is the strategy?

BBTM part 2: Comverse & Continuous Computing

Comverse


Comverse is proposing a full spectrum holistic solution to video optimization, including PCEF, DPI, Optimization, Charging and some aspects of  PCRF.
What caught my attention is their strong push for Gi based optimization vs. Gn. 
They advocate that  measure of congestion at RAN level is inconsistent and inconclusive.

The big push is certainly as well an attempt to ward off the network vendors (ALU, NSN, Ericsson, Huawei, ZTE), by arguing that there is an inherent conflict of interest when these vendors are both trying to sell carriers capacity and optimization at the same time. (My experience of working with all these companies is that 80% of the time, the right hand does not know what the left hand does and that for conflict of interest to exist, it would require a lot better organization and strategy than what I have observed).



Comverse proposes that for effective cell-based congestion detection, a mechanism such as a radius interim messages,  triggered at cell level, not Rnc, would provide an effective way to relay RAN congestion indications to the core.


I agree with the premises but I am not sure of the conclusion. A lot of the congestion at RAN level is also signalling and you could end up in interesting snowball effects with Radius messages (notably inefficient, that is one of the primary reasons for Diameter's invention) could greatly contribute to the congestion they are trying to stave off. 


Now, Diameter repeaters at RAN level... that could help.

Continuous computing
I was curious to hear from CC after their recent acquisition by Radisys in May. They present themselves as an "arm dealer" in the optimization and traffic offload war between vendors and offer some interesting perspectives.



Offload is a cost effective way to manage surges and traffic increases but presents significant challenges in CALEA (Legal interception from Law Enforcement Agencies) and charging and policy. 
Effectively, when traffic is offloaded at RAN level, you need paths to trombone it back to the core network for charging, PCRF and optimization functions if you want to get most of your investment, while satisfying both legal regulations and customer SLA.

The rest of the presentation focused of course on Continuous Computing's solution that collocates DPI, traffic offload (on Lu interface, between Rnc and SGSN) and interacts "seamlessly" with their  video optimization, tromboning traffic back to the core before going to the internet through Gi.


I don't think that the "just another bump in the wire" theory actually works for video, where every millisecond of latency counts against the user experience.

BBTM: The value circle and content based charging

Broadband traffic management North America took place in Boston, on June 21, 22.
Here are my notes from the event and highlights from the conference.

This is the first year that Informa holds this event in North America. After the great success of the UK edition last November, they decided to create regional offspring of the show in Middle East, North America and Asia, with the global edition still planned in the UK this November.


The show, like in the UK, featured most of the subjects that are relevant in Mobile Broadband:

• Data offload,
• Policy management and charging,
• Video optimization,
• Femtocells,
• Traffic optimization...

The attendance and presentations were mostly vendors, with only a few carriers represented (AT&T, Verizon, Cricket, Telecom Italy). No doubt the ratio will change in the future as the show takes on a more visible role in North America.


Here are a few of the highlights from my perspective:


Jeff Eisenach - Navigant Economics
Jeff is a veteran of the US regulatory forums. He had an interesting presentation about the change from value chain to value circle in wireless. Forcing carriers to reconsider old notions such as "owning the customer".



















I quite like the concept. Now customers actually have relationships with content owners, aggregators, phone manufacturers and carriers... No one owns the customer, they are shared and in my mind it will force more concessions from carriers in the future beyond the revenue shares that we have seen between the likes of AT&T and Apple for iPhone.


My panel:
How Can Carriers Move Away From Unlimited Data Plans While Keeping Customers Happy?
with:

• Mike Coward, Co-Founder & CTO, Continuous Computing
• Fred Kemmerer, CTO, Genband
• Chris Hoover, VP Product Marketing and Management, Openet

There are still a lot of talks about content-based charging from PCRF vendors. It seems to be the projected cure for all that ails mobile networks. Too much OTT in your network? Content-based charging is the solution. Too much P2P traffic? Content-based charging is the solution....


 When I asked how you reconcile content, transport and application offering the following example, it was clear that there is still a lot of work to do by charging and policy vendors to enable true content-based charging.


On my iPhone, I can watch video from the browser or from an app. Some apps, before serving you content ask your permission to push notifications or to use your location. If an app invokes a content and invokes gps or other network based service, how does the network operator is to understand that this video is YouTube, from the app, not the browser, invoking gps for location targeting and charging for the overall service?
Today, inevitably, the user gets charged for data transport of the video and the GPS call. Even if an operator offers all-you-can-eat YouTube, you still get charged for the GPS call, right? Because the network is not intelligent enough to make the contextual difference between me using my map app and invoking GPS or a third party app invoking GPS.

As more and more discussions about content based charging ensued, I offer that an operator attempting to derive revenue from OTT service will inevitably need to get closer to content and app providers.
Content providers will demand revenue share on revenues generated from their services. Otherwise, you will see content providers encrypting the traffic in an attempt to keep control of the user experience and to deny the operator the capability to throttle or mangle the content delivery.


Next generation DPI, traffic management, pcrf and proxies are necessary.
I believe that operators will have to extend quality of service (QOS) and quality of experience (QOE) control to the content provider, beyond the operators' walled garden, if they want an efficient revenue share or load share model.

Bridgewater Systems to be acquired by Amdocs for $211M

"Becoming part of Amdocs would enable us to accelerate our corporate growth strategy, centered around global expansion, enabling the transformation to next generation converged networks, portfolio and solution innovation, and leveraging our installed base," said Ed Ogonek, President and CEO, Bridgewater.


As mobile traffic continues to increase and video becomes an increasing part of it, it will be necessary to have a tight intelligent traffic management entity. I see collapse of charging, DPI, PCRF, Routing, Browsing and optimization accelerating. Remember, AMDOCS acquired streamezzo last year to tighten their mobile video story.

In my mind, carriers tolerate today having GGSN, PCEF, proxies, browsing gateways, DPI, web optimization, video optimization engines only because the market is very atomized. The skill set is very dispersed and no vendor today has an intelligent end to end solution to manage traffic from backbone to RAN through core.
As discussed previously, the market is not mature enough for the best of breed approach, full spectrum vendors will step up.

As video traffic increases, it will become evident that having a daisy chain of proxies is inefficient, costly, hardly scalable and complex to manage. I don't see policy management becoming so ubiquitous and intuitive that rules can be instantiated in one point and flow harmoniously to all the elements without impacting the user experience.
The user experience, in video is only as good as the lowest performing element in the delivery chain.

Inevitably, we will see more concentration in that space in the near future.