Bytemobile delivers mobile video/data optimization-in-a-box

While mobile operators beef up raw capacity in the radio access network, they need to pay as much attention to other choke-points, including in the IP core. Today, Bytemobile, which has been selling video optimization software to operators for some time now, announced its first purpose-built “box,” – an all-in-one mobile Web/video management platform to help wireless carriers better manage exploding mobile data usage.

Bytemobile’s new T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager (the first product in its T3000 product series) sits “in-line” in operator networks and brings together an array of video transcoding, optimization and policy capabilities to ensure delivery to high-value customers while lessening the load on the overall mobile network, Michael Disini, Bytemobile’s director of product marketing said in an interview. The platform can detect and react to network conditions in the cell, radio access network (RAN) and core in milliseconds.

“As we move to faster networks, for operators it becomes about how to prevent bad experiences at moments of congestion,” Disini said. “To do that you need to coordinate multiple network elements in order to see a view of all the traffic and get a global view of all subscribers.”

To enable that, Bytemobile’s platform brings together elements of policy, deep packet inspection and caching/load balancing in a single box that sits next to a network GGSN and/or HSS database, Disini said. “We can take a look at the traffic holistically and apply the necessary traffic controls.”

Like seemingly all things IP these days, the management focus is more on customer experience than mere traffic management. With the Bytemobile platform, that includes managing traffic not just across the lower levels of the network but all the way up through the content layer, Disini said, and ultimately makes it more of a business intelligence platform than anything.

Up to now, Bytemobile has sold a good portion of such capabilities as part of its Unison solution (in use at many Vodafone and T-Mobile properties, among others), which runs on industry standard hardware – such as IBM blade servers. With new T3100 platform, the vendor puts those smarts and more into a new purpose-built bo,x making it even easier for operators to purchase and deploy the capabilities they need to deal with mobile traffic challenges. “Operators want an enclosed network element they can drop into, for instance, a distributed LTE network,” Disini said.

While mobile traffic management and fair usage management capabilities these days are promised by a slew of niche vendors – notably DPI and policy vendors – Bytemobile believes its ultimate competition will come from larger network equipment vendors in both the IP core (Cisco and Juniper) and the radio access (NSN and Ericsson) network.