LTE World Summit 2014

This year's 10th edition of the conference, seems to have found a new level of maturity. While VoLTE, RCS, IMS are still subjects of interest, we seem to be past the hype at last (see last year), with a more pragmatic outlook towards implementation and monetization. 

I was happy to see that most operators are now recognizing the importance of managing video experience for monetization. Du UAE's VP of Marketing, Vikram Chadha seems to get it:

"We are transitioning our pricing strategy from bundles and metering to services. We are introducing email, social media, enterprise packages and are looking at separating video from data as a LTE monetization strategy."

As a result, the keynotes were more prosaic than in the past editions, focusing on cost of spectrum acquisitions and regulatory pressure in the European Union preventing operators to mount any defensible position against the OTT assault on their networks. Much of the agenda of the show focused on pragmatic subjects such as roaming, pricing, policy management, heterogeneous networks and wifi/cellular handover. Nothing obviously earth shattering on these subjects, but steady progress, as the technologies transition from lab to commercial trials and deployment. 

As an example, there was a great presentation by Bouygues Telecom's EVP of Strategy Frederic Ruciak highlighting the company's strategy for the launch of LTE in France, A very competitive market, and how the company was able to achieve the number one spot in LTE market share, despite being the "challenger" number 3 in 2 and 3G.

The next buzzword on the hype cycle to point its head is NFV with many operator CTOs publicly hailing the new technology as the magic bullet that will allow them to "launch services in days or weeks rather than years". I am getting quite tired of hearing that rationalization as an excuse for the multimillion investments made in this space, especially when no one seems to know what these new services will be. Right now, the only arguable benefit is on capex cost containment and I have seen little evidence that it will pass this stage in the mid term. Like the teenage sex joke, no one seems to know what it is, but everybody claims to be doing it. 

There is still much to be resolved on this matter and that discussion will continue for some time. The interesting new positioning I heard at the show is appliance vendors referring to their offering as PNF (as in physical) in contrast and as enablers for VNF. Although it sounds like a marketing trick, it makes a lot of sense for vendors to illustrate how NFV inserts itself in a legacy network, leading inevitably to a hybrid network architecture. 

The consensus here seems to be that there are two prevailing strategies for introduction of virtualized network functions. 

1. The first one, "cap and grow" sees existing infrastructure equipments being capped beyond a certain capacity and little by little complemented by virtualized functions, allowing incremental traffic to find its way on the virtualized infrastructure. A variant might be "cap and burst" where a function subject to bursts traffic is dimensioned on physical assets to the mean peak traffic and all exceeding traffic is diverted to a virtualized function. 
2. The second seems to favour the creation of vertical virtualized networks for market or traffic segments that are greenfield. M2M and VoLTE being the most cited examples. 

Both strategies have advantages and flaws that I am exploring in my upcoming report on "NFV & virtualization in mobile networks 2014". Contact me for more information.

LTE Asia: transition from technology to value... or die

I am just back from LTE Asia in Singapore, where I chaired the track on Network Optimization. The show was well attended with over 900 people by Informa's estimate. 

Once again, I am a bit surprised and disappointed by the gap between operators and vendors' discourse.

By and large, operators who came (SK, KDDI, KT, Chungwha, HKCSL, Telkomsel, Indosat to name but a few) had excellent presentations on their past successes and current challenges, highlighting the need for new revenue models, a new content (particularly video) value chain and better customer engagement.

Vendors of all stripes seem to consistently miss the message and try to push technology when their customer need value. I appreciate that the transition is difficult and as I was reflecting with a vendor's executive at the show, selling technology feels somewhat safer and easier than value.
But, as many operators are finding out in their home turf, their consumers do not care much about technology any more. It is about brand, service, image and value that OTT service providers are winning consumers mind share. Here lies the risk and opportunity. Operators need help to evolve and re invent the mobile value chain. 

The value proposition of vendors must evolve towards solutions such as intelligent roaming, 2-way business models with content providers, service type prioritization (messaging, social, video, entertainment, sports...), bundling and charging...

At the heart of this necessary revolution is something that makes many uneasy. DPI and traffic classification, relying on ports and protocols is the basis of today's traffic management and is becoming rapidly obsolete. A new generation of traffic management engines is needed. The ability to recognize content and service types at a granular level is key. How can the mobile industry can evolve in the OTT world if operators are not able to recognize a content that is user-generated vs. Hollywood? How can operators monetize video if they cannot detect, recognize, prioritize, assure advertising content?

Operators have some key assets, though. Last mile delivery, accurate customer demographics, billing relationship and location must be leveraged. YouTube knows whether you are on iPad or laptop but not necessarily whether your cellular interface is 3G, HSPA, LTE... they certainly can't see whether a user's poor connection is the result of network congestion, spectrum interference, distance from the cell tower or throttling because the user exceeds its data allowance... There is value there, if operators are ready to transform themselves and their organization to harvest and sell value, not access...

Opportunities are many. Vendors who continue to sell SIP, IMS, VoLTE, Diameter and their next generation hip equivalent LTE Adavanced, 5G, cloud, NFV... will miss the point. None of these are of interest for the consumer. Even if the operator insist on buying or talking about technology, services and value will be key to success... unless you are planning to be an M2M operator, but that is a story for another time.

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?