Competitive Edge

Runners train hard and frequently. They run up and down hills, long and slow, and work hard during intervals. They test their speed, increase their mileage and keep an eye on their competitors.

Runners use new technology to improve their results, they wear dry fit shirts, tights and even socks, measure their speed and heart rate with the latest Apple aps, Garmin or Polar. They listen to special playlists with songs that change rhythm according to their current running speed, and consume gels, sport drinks and protein shakes.

Runners do everything they can to shave off those extra seconds and become faster.

When shoe technology dramatically improved in the 80’s, and brands introduced a lighter shoe that promised  energy return, added  spring to your step and made you run faster, runners didn’t stop running up those steep hills, they didn't stop running in the right heart rate zone, or checking out their competitors - they carried on training.

Even with new technology improvements we still need to do all we can to keep a competitive edge.

So when upgrading to LTE, don’t sit back and watch your competitors overtake you – carry on optimization, check your systems heart rate - don’t let it struggle up those hills.

-- Fiona Ungar, Corporate Marketing Manager

Sitting on a Gold Mine

It’s no secret that mobile advertising is the riddle that virtually every major digital player tries to solve. Mobile Advertising is expected to jump six-fold from $3.3B last year (2011) to $20.6B in 2015, according to Gartner. Although both companies reported a growth in mobile advertising this week, Facebook has admitted that while it has almost half a billion mobile device users, it still isn't sure whether it's mobile business model is working or  not, and Google hasn't blown anyone away with it's result so far either.

For mobile advertising to succeed, it needs to be optimized for small screens, and provide a highly contextual personalized mobile experience based on the customer’s past behavior and current intent. An ad which is too good for users to pass up.

If carriers want their fair share of the media pie, they need to fight against over-the–top players and leverage their unique valuable assets. Carriers can bring brands a more targeted audience and context relevancy, something missing from most mobile advertising initiatives.

Mobile carriers sit on a lucrative gold mine – they have access to their users preferences such as  Google searches, Facebook posts, Tweets, Call Detail Record’s (CDR’s), apps, etc., and can communicate with users over various medias (snail mail, calls, email, in-app advertising). Add this to the consumer’s preferences, billing relationship and a host of anonymized data on subscribers, and advertisers finally get a tool they can use in nearly every situation.

Mobile carriers can provide tailored offers triggered when relevant, for example when a consumer is near a store or e-commerce site they are offered a coupon and can pay via their mobile device. Carriers actually are the only ones that can link activities to a specific user and provide a closed loop.

The world’s largest carriers, AT&T, Telefonica, SingTel and others, have created new business units focusing on digital advertising. These carriers are realizing that mobile advertising represents the best opportunity for growth in their business in the face of rising infrastructure costs, churn and declining margins.

Will other carriers join? Who should and who shouldn’t? Which ecosystem, software and service solutions will best support mobile carriers for success?

-- Ilanit Zehut, Director of Business Development

Trains, Airplane and Seating Strategies

As an avid train commuter I have often wondered about the manner in which train seats are occupied. Suppose you board a train at the first station, half of the 4-seat areas are occupied with one or more passengers and half are empty, offering you the promise of a whole 4-seat area to yourself.

The inexperienced passenger will probably opt for one of the empty 4-seat areas. Alas there are more stations on the way and the train quickly fills up, people sit next to you, people you did not choose to sit beside. Sometimes it will be someone that invades your personal space, and sometimes it will be someone that feels compelled to shout into their cell phone. If you’re lucky it is someone pleasant and quiet, but a guy called Murphy will never let that happen.  

One way around this is to place your personal bag in the seat beside you and pretend to be deeply immersed in the sports section. This may earn you a neighbor less ride; however there are two problems with this approach:

1. It is anti-social and not very polite to deny someone a seat just because you want your ride to be more pleasant.
2. Most probably, it will be the less pleasant people that request you move your bag so they can have a seat.

Airplanes and first class trains solve this problem by assigning seats per ticket. They also sell different types of tickets at different prices. The main difference between the tickets is (you guessed right) the amount of space you have.This method has two main advantages:

1. It allows airlines to better monetize their service – this is crucial in high cost services.
2. It optimizes seat allocation – there are no disputes on seats, people get more or less what they paid for, and the space is allocated in the best possible manner - no passengers stand while other passengers take up two seats.

As Flash Networks is all about optimizing mobile data networks, the allegory is probably well understood by now. Fixed line ISPs are like trains – they have enough space to accommodate all types of behavior and do not need to invest in optimizing their service – their costs are very low so whenever there is a problem they just “add more wagons” or “throw bandwidth at the problem”. However mobile operators cannot use this method, they are like the airlines – they have very high costs, and their resources, like airplanes, need to be obtained well in advance, leaving them with the need to best optimize and monetize their service in order to prosper and avoid pitfalls.

-- Tal Dagan, Director of Product Management

Beauty Speed Tests Regulated

The US FCC regulator decided to conduct an official mobile broadband performance test program, following the success of the wireline program. This step comes not a minute too soon since mobile broadband speeds were not regulated and one could set up and perform their own testing criteria.

Being the fastest is one of the main interests of any mobile network marketing executive, and recently it has become even more important. Revenue share from voice and text is dropping, content revenues are diminishing, and since everyone sells iPhones - devices are no longer a factor for competition. The only competitive factor left is: Who has the fastest network? 

Since there is no regulation on download speed and there is a BIG difference between advertised and effective throughput for mobile networks, we need to ask: How are network speed tests defined?  Are the tests run with the help of applications like Speedtest or BenchBee,  which simply test uplink and downlink download speed,  or are the tests more comprehensive, and the network tested for fast web page download, fast application response time, and smooth video? 

Unfortunately, the simple speed tests are the ones mostly conducted. The most common mobile device used for speed testing is the iPhone, since it can’t be customized by the operator unlike other smartphones or even PC dongles, and the comparison is purely on the network service performance.

Who performs speed tests? In many cases this is the domain of technology magazines. They invest a great deal of resources creating methodologies that provide full nationwide coverage, and test the network with various devices in different locations. A good example is PC Magazine in the US that occasionally publishes speed tests (latest review of LTE networks in the US). Another example is Connect Magazine in Germany.

Recently governments and independent organizations have also started conducting network tests. The British Ofcom organization provides UK market speed tests, and the ARCEP in France. It is only natural that the FCC joins this area as well. 

How can operators succeed in the speed test? In order to do well in the test many operators deploy optimization systems, and since most of the tests are repeated, mobile optimization systems provide a better chance for operators to succeed.

Download speed is back as the top factor of competition for mobile operators, whether if it’s important to customers or because it’s the only issue of competition left – the race is on.

--Amir Lapid, Director of Product Marketing

Mobile apps taking over your phone?

I know the feeling. Most of us find ourselves weeding out old and unused applications from our smartphones; apps we don’t even remember when and why we installed in the first place. 

At the beginning, the whole app experience was new and exciting. I personally downloaded more and more applications just to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything. When the amount of apps on my phone became overwhelming, I started to use the old-style directory system to make them easier to find. But now, after a few years and hundreds of apps, I am lost.

The whole experience of consuming data through mobile apps has gotten out of control. Is it really intuitive (or convenient) to install a specific app to read news from several publishers, buy goods from several retailers, or even check a train timetable? Let’s think about how it’s done on our laptops. We open the browser, search for the train timetable in Google, and that’s it – we have what we need. The information is immediately available, we just browse in and out without the need to install anything.

The whole mobile app mania started with iPhone. They wanted to provide the best user experience on mobile devices (which, back in 2007, the browser couldn’t support) and control the content and its potential revenue. But now businesses are no longer eager to share 30% of their revenues with Apple (The Financial Times is a text book example).  They prefer to build their own mobile web apps which are accessible to a wider audience and better maintained for multiple platforms. From a technical perspective, both browsers and development tools provide an easier user experience, which better suit a wide range of app development segments.

Between the preferred experience of searching and consuming without installing (… and removing) apps and the shift away from proprietary apps, my wish is that we will see more publishers, content developers, and users moving back to the browser.

-- On Kalich, Director of Product Marketing

Making traffic growth work for you

A recent report issued by Latitude Group caught my attention:  in Q2 2012, one in five website visits came from a mobile device – a 26% growth over Q1. At first it sounded like another standard item which shows the growth of the mobile Internet, but there was something bigger in between the lines.

Growth in mobile web visitors driven primarily by iOS

So, why did it catch my attention?

What’s surprising is how low this figure still is (20%) in comparison to the amazingly high growth of mobile traffic we constantly experience. With growth of 26% quarter over quarter, we will soon see 2 of every 5 website visits, or even more, coming from mobile devices. This means that while we haven’t yet reached a plateau in traffic growth, it won’t be long before mobile traffic overtakes fixed traffic with respect to page visits.

So what does this mean for mobile operators? On the one hand, their window of opportunity to take action in managing traffic is rapidly closing; but at the same time, it is rapidly materializing with respect to monetizing this OTT data. It is time to manage the data growth while monetizing the incremental data.

The good news for mobile operators is that there are advanced technologies out there that can help them with both challenges simultaneously. By adopting solutions from companies, like Flash Networks, that understand these opportunities and combine cost saving solutions with revenue-generating solutions in a single system, operators don’t have to choose only one direction to pursue. Investing in only one may be too little too late. The smart investment is a solution that can grow in both directions.

-- Gil Mildworth, Director of Business Development

Mobile Traffic Surges During UEFA EURO 2012

As football (soccer) fans already know, last week was the final of UEFA's EURO 2012. And although the game was disappointing for Italy fans (probably an understatement), it showed us interesting trends in mobile data traffic.

During the games, Digital Spy published research showing that 8.3% of British fans were watching the EURO 2012 games on the web via a desktop, notebook computer, smartphone, or tablet.

Using Harmony Analytics, we found the same thing, and not just in Europe.

We observed a 156% increase of traffic to sports sites in Asia-Pacific and a 215% increase in Europe during the final match day. In addition, in Europe, there was a 210% increase in HTTP streaming of live sports broadcasts during the EURO 2012 final match day, while in Asia-Pacific the increase was only 20%. These statistics were reversed for P2P streaming, with a 123% average increase in Asia-Pacific and a 42% average increase in Europe in June, the month of the competition, compared to the same timeframe during the previous month. These findings reflect the differences in the way Europeans and Asians view football over mobile networks.

Unsurprisingly, in North America there was only a minor increase in sport-related traffic during EURO 2012, with an 8% increase in mobile internet traffic for sports sites and a 24% increase in the P2P streaming peak during the games. This demonstrates the popularity of European football in Asia-Pacific and Europe versus North America where, despite David Beckham's best efforts, "soccer" hasn't yet caught on at the same rate as the rest of the world.

With the summer Olympics rapidly approaching, it will be interesting to see how mobile traffic trends are affected. Four years ago, at the Bejing Olympics, iPhones were only a year into the market and iPads were only a pipe dream. With mobile devices of all types penetrating the market in increasing numbers, we look forward to seeing how operators plan for the anticipated surges in traffic. Stay tuned for more Olympic insights ...

-- Naomi Rabbie, Director of Corporate Marketing

Globe Telecom and Flash Networks Win 2012 Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award

We are pleased to announce that, together with Globe Telecom, we were named winners of the prestigious Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Innovation Award for Mobile Content and Services Innovation. 

We and Globe Telecom were selected in recognition of the web monetization services implemented by Globe Telecom, offering its subscribers access to a variety of rich content with a differentiated and branded experience across multiple mobile Internet devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and netbooks. Our capabilities will enable Globe Telecom to recommend and provide one-stop–shop access to up-to-date account information, a variety of data plans, news, social networks, bookmarks, and multiple search tools.

In its sixth year, the GTB awards were found by Global Telecoms Business magazine to reward and encourage outstanding technological achievements and innovations in the telecommunications space. The awards are always granted to partnerships between vendors and operators. This year, we are in good company with other winners, including: Telkomsel and NSN; Telus and Huawei; and Telefonica and Alcatel Lucent, among others.


-- Naomi Rabbie, Director of Corporate Marketing

Beyond mobile video optimization

Mobile Video Optimization 2012, the only event dedicated entirely to mobile video optimization, starts today. As Bronze sponsors of the event, we are excited to have the opportunity to present our unique capabilities to an audience of European mobile operators. Liam Galin, our President & CEO, will be presenting “Beyond Optimization – Next Generation Services” and Tal Dagan, our Director of Product Management, will be participating in a panel on QoE vs. QoS. 


As a teaser to what will be divulged at the event, we published a press release today revealing minimum quality of experience levels that lead to subscribers abandoning video viewing and downloads. We found that subscribers who experienced eight or more seconds of video stalls (buffering) were 73% more likely to abandon video viewing, resulting in customer frustration and possibly churn. Operators can use this quality of experience metric to determine when and what type of optimization technique to apply to ensure a smooth video viewing experience.


We also found that some subscribers receive more bandwidth than their usage requires while others aren’t receiving enough bandwidth to ensure a smooth video viewing experience. To address this issue, our Harmony platform pinpoints specific areas in the network that are experiencing traffic congestion, whom the affected subscribers are, and the end-to-end experience for specific users, enabling operators to manage service performance proactively and promptly. Harmony is then able to reallocate bandwidth based on the true needs of individual subscribers, thereby ensuring a positive user experience for all.


In addition, by optimizing only where and when required, Harmony ensures a high quality of experience while providing a small footprint solution. This is especially relevant for LTE networks, which are ultra-high capacity networks with enormous amounts of data.


If you’re in the neighborhood, come check us out at Mobile Video Optimization 2012, June 12-13, at the Marriot Hotel in Brussels, Belgium.


-- Naomi Rabbie, Director of Corporate Marketing

Will CDNs conquer the mobile data market?

As we all know, mobile operators today are looking for new and creative ways to generate revenues. Costly infrastructure and an increasing number of over-the-top players have minimized their profitability and potential for future growth. To address these challenges, operators are seeking additional ways to monetize their assets, in a “Telco 2.0” style, by adapting their infrastructure to new vertical markets. As a result, more and more operators are prioritizing and optimizing premium content delivery, similar to content delivery networks (CDNs).


Traditionally, CDN companies like Akamai, Limelight, and Level3 owned this business by creating a worldwide overlay network that enabled them to offer content providers better quality of experience by delivering web content from locations closer to the edge. This strategy was planned mainly for the fixed network, where the major bottleneck and costs were in the Internet transit, and CDNs successfully minimized this bottleneck and provided value for their content providers. However, fixed operators themselves never really yielded much value from this structure, and were left out of the value chain.


For mobile operators, it’s a different story. Today’s mobile users demand fixed-line like speeds while using HSPA+ and LTE networks. They use their smartphones to watch HQ and HD video, perform financial transactions, and get up-to-date news and music. However, the user experience is still rather disappointing, especially during busy hours.


Mobile operators have a clear opportunity here. Instead of allowing traditional CDNs to dominate this market and take over this potential business, operators can take an active role by becoming mobile CDNs themselves and charging content providers to deliver better QoE, while saving infrastructure costs. In fact, at the CTIA show in May, Verizon Communication’s CTO, Tony Melone, said that Verizon is considering mechanisms that would allow content suppliers to pay for users' access fees.


Is this a realistic option? Maybe. But first operators need to address 3 major obstacles:

1. Net-neutrality limitations currently do not enable operators to discriminate between different content sources.
2. Operators can’t realistically build business relations with all content providers, which lack the global nature of traditional CDNs.
3. Can real quality of experience improvements be achieved over the mobile network? Can QoS be guaranteed over 3G and 4G networks end-to-end? How can operators really improve QoE measurements such as page load and app response time, and reduced number of stalls in video clips?

The third challenge is the most solvable for operators. To address it, operators must first have the ability to measure network quality and performance in real-time. This will give operators what CDNs do not have today – visibility into where data traffic is really congested within the RAN.


In addition, operators must have the ability to apply smart traffic optimization according to their network quality findings. With this dynamic traffic optimization, operators will be able to do more than caching, by both improving QoE and reducing their costs. Therefore, mobile CDNs (operators) that can offer traffic optimization will be able to strengthen their B2B proposition to content providers by providing pre-optimized, cached content that dramatically improves the user experience. 


Better user experience in mobile web content consumption means: more visited pages, higher ads and search conversion rates, more m-commerce transactions, and higher overall user satisfaction.

-- Ilanit Zehut, Director of Business Development

Mobile Operators Should Think More Like Facebook

Facebook Stock Certificate

With the Facebook IPO on the horizon, and its estimated valuation reaching over $100B, this is a good time for mobile operators to rethink their business models. Needless to say, Facebook has never charged its users, asked them for their credit cards, or sent invoices to their homes. Nevertheless, its revenues are expected to hit $5B in 2012, with 85% coming from ads. Facebook is capable of reaching these enormous numbers primarily because businesses, no matter how large they are, are always interested in increasing exposure to their products and services, and are willing to share their revenues in order to do so.


So what does this have to do with mobile operators?

First, and this is obvious, the mobile internet is a sustainable source of revenues for its industry. As Jon Stewart said about the internet, “it’s a keeper.” This is good news for mobile operators struggling to maintain revenues from traditional voice and messaging services in the face of competition and regulation.

Second, for mobile operators to compete in the Internet playing field, they need to get in the game and start thinking more like Internet players, such as Facebook. Rather than sticking to traditional subscription-based business models, they need to get creative. This means not only selling their own content and services directly, but also using their unique position between their users and the internet to offer interesting and relevant content and services from anywhere on the web, using affiliation plans and revenue-sharing.

To do this, operators need to find the real-estate to effectively present these recommendations and promotions to their users – either on the monthly bill, their portal, or, for maximum visibility, within the browser itself. Our monetization solution provides operators with this valuable real-estate - our web toolbar - and the supporting ecosystem to start generating and sharing revenues today. 


-- Chen Didi-Barnea, Product Marketing Manager

Football frustrations – a personal experience

Every football fan (or soccer fan, for those of you in the US) in Europe and worldwide was watching the El Clasico last Saturday. For those readers who are not die-hard football fans, I will just say that this is “The Game” – between the two biggest rivals in the Spanish football league. Needless to say, it’s a big deal.

No doubt, the best viewing experience for a game of this magnitude is a 50” HD TV set in the living room, surrounded by good friends, cold beer, and plentiful snacks. But recently, with the proliferation of large screen smartphones and handsets, a new mobile experience was introduced. In theory, you can now watch entire football matches on your mobile device, in high video resolution, over advanced 3G and 4G mobile networks.  But does this really work, and can it satisfy a true football fan?

Honestly, not always.

First of all, for this kind of experience your mobile device becomes stationary by default. Your device’s battery consumption while watching multimedia is so huge, you have to stay close to a power supply.

Secondly, the video viewing experience is obviously affected by the quality of your network. The high expenses and environmental limitations of mobile networks naturally create bottlenecks during the busy hour, which means not everyone can watch a live game at the same time in a limited geographical area. The result – a frustrating viewing experience with frequent stalls and freezes. And unlike the battery issue, where users are prone to blame the device manufacturer, when your viewing experience is affected, you blame the mobile operator. Is this what I’m paying for?!?

Mobile operators know this but are very limited in how to deal with the problem. They can’t just provide unlimited bandwidth to everyone who wants it. Some operators plan to offer you more bandwidth during the busy hour for extra money. But how would they do this? In order to allocate additional bandwidth for premium users, they will have to reduce the bandwidth of their remaining subscribers. And the most common way to do this is to throttle videos using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliances. While this might solve the problem for premium users, it will also create a lot of unsatisfied customers – those who haven’t upgraded their data packages.

A better alternative would be to adapt the video to a lower bitrate whenever needed. This would make the video watchable for everyone, albeit with slightly lower (but still entirely acceptable) quality. If I had to watch Christiano Ronaldo’s goal, and the network was loaded, I would prefer to see it with slightly lower quality rather than have it freeze at the critical moment right before the kick. And I think my fellow football fans would agree with me.

The El Clasico ended with Madridista fans cheering for a 2-1 victory which probably leads the way to a championship over the glorious Barcelona. And with the new technologies, everyone should be able to see the next nail-biter on their mobile device.

And to help you get the impending summer season started in a typical Spanish style, here is a nice quick way to make your own Sangria:

Ingredients:

• 1 bottle of red wine
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup orange juice (natural)
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 100 ml rum
• 3 peaches
• 2 apples

1. Melt the sugar in a small amount boiled water and chill
2. Cut the fruit into small cubes
3. Put all the ingredients in a big bowl and stir well
4. Chill well (better with large ice cubes than small ones, as they chill faster and melt slower)
5. To make it extra festive, you can add 250 ml of vodka

Enjoy!

-- Amir Lapid, Director of Product Management

What do mobile experience and a first grader’s math class have in common?

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my son’s day in school.

In fact, I would be happy to talk about it for the better part of the day.

The problem is, I don’t know much about it.

I only know it was “fun.”

Actually, I’m not sure about that either. “Fun,” is the automatic reply I get when I ask him, “How was your day at school?”

So what does this have to do with the mobile experience?

Mobile operators’ knowledge of what their subscribers are doing and how users experience the mobile Internet is similar in many ways to a father asking his son how his day was.

Operators may have limited knowledge about the radio side of the network, but not much more. This is analogous to me knowing my son’s curriculum. I may know when he starts  his math class and when he has recess, but I don’t know how he felt in class. Did he enjoy himself? Or maybe (like too many of us) he hated every minute. And what did he do during recess? Did he play football? Maybe he had an argument with his best friend?

In the same way, operators today are looking for ways to know more about their subscribers’ experience and they need to have clear metrics to do so.

What are their users most interested in while they surf the web? (Maybe you can offer them a deal that relates to their field of interest.)

What was their experience? How long did it take for the video to start? How long did it take the page to load? (Maybe you can prevent subscriber churn if you spot a problematic event and act on it.)

To help operators answer these questions, and many more, we enable them to extract user experience data from their networks. But we also provide much more information, such as data hogging subscribers, top applications, top web sites, average browsing speed, and more! All this information helps operators create a more complete picture of their subscribers’ online behavior to better target their interests while addressing any problems that may arise – a win-win for both you and your users.

Of course, you could always just ask your subscribers how their experience was but you’ll probably get the equivalent of “fun” as an answer.

-- Tal Dagan, Director of Product Management

Welcome

Welcome to Flash Networks' official company blog. We plan on posting our thoughts, ideas, analysis, insight, and general comments on the exciting and ever-evolving world of the mobile Internet. Stay tuned for more ...