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

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

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