Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - MWC Archives

Aruba Networks Shows WiFi Can Boost Retail Traffic

2013-03-05T17:14:28Z

Aruba Networks had a few interesting announcements recently at Mobile World Congress 2013 and the first one shows how WiFi can be used as a differentiator and driver of retail traffic. In a deployment with NTT Broadband Platform or NTTBP the companies proudly unveiled the fact they are deploying a joint WIFi solution named Wi-Fi Cloud Services and its being deployed at over 10,000 Seven-Eleven locations as well as other retail locations owned by the mutual parent company in Japan.

This is important because the service includes an offering to consumers which allows them to come to the stores and download and stream music and other content. In this way the WiFi network supports a marketing initiative which makes the stores in-effect more "sticky."

As the content is the "hook" so to speak, it is imperative the quality of the network is up to par. In other words if a dozen people jump on this carrier-agnostic network and initiate applications or services which demand large amounts of bandwidth, there is the potential for the quality of the promoted content to suffer.

As Ben Gibson (pictured), CMO explained to me - this is where the 7200 Mobility Controller comes in. The granular access policy management based on user, device, application and location means the system can determine which traffic is of high value and needs QoS. Other traffic unrelated to the offer can connect directly to the Internet and be handled in a best-effort manner.

Moreover, he touted Aruba Activate - the company's solution which allows access points to auto-configure without the need for manual intervention.

Other news the company broke at the show had to do once again with the 7200 (pictured) - this time its ability to provide managed services and cellular offload. The company in its news release touted its solution as 40 times lower in capital cost, 14 times lower in power consumption and one-third the rack space of "competitive offerings" which is typically the code phrase for Cisco.

He further explained Aruba's HybridControl WiFi architecture allows a carrier to support more than 32,000 WiFi hotspots with a single controller.

What is interesting to me is the way QoS-enabled WiFi is being used as a marketing tool to drive traffic to brick and mortar stores. We know Starbucks was a pioneer in providing free WiFi but when a cup of coffee you sell can cost more than five times more than the competition, its easy to justify the price of free broadband.

For other retail stores we may start to see more promotional services possibly in combination with record companies, artists, movie studies and television content creators. The point is, WiFi may go from being an afterthought in retail to a strategic asset which drives micro-communities of real breathing human beings who purchase products at a cash register.

Technology has disrupted traditional retail allowing consumers to buy via apps and browsers... Perhaps now it will like a boomerang be utilized broadly to get those same consumers more interested in not only visiting but spending time in malls, convenience stores and other non-virtual locations.

xCom Global's International Wireless Solution is Fantastic

2013-03-02T23:22:43Z

Perhaps the best part of my trip to Barcelona, Spain to visit Mobile World Congress 2013 was not having to worry about wireless broadband the entire time I was there. You see I was sent a review unit of the XCom Global wireless broadband device which allowed me to stay connected the entire time I was in the country without having to worry about roaming charges, overage charges and heaven knows what other sorts of fees and taxes one deals with when leaving their home country.

The company sent me a used Novatel Wirelss MiFi 2372, instructions, an extra battery and a case of adapters for various outlets throughout the world. They gave me a SIM for Spain and I was off and running. Did it work? Yes. Was it awesome? Yes. Verizon charges $25/100MB for international access and if you are a heavy data user like I am - you will pay through the nose.

XCom Global solutions come in a variety of flavors including USB modem and hotspot

As a result of the XCom Global modem, I didn't need to use my wireless access that often. The few times I did use it resulted from the XCom Wireless modem shutting off or disconnecting. It did this from time to time but I did make it one whole day without having this problem at all. Perhaps the used modem had a flaw. But of course this is speculation.

It's worth pointing out the testing environment I used was brutal - the Mobile World Congress convention center. It was full of WiFi access points - probably more than the average person will ever see at once on their device.

The good news is that in four days of using the modem in this environment, it worked amazingly well. As long as I was connected I was able to communicate. Sure, sometimes it slowed down but regardless of how deep I was inside the steel and concrete I was always able to get a signal.

At nights I took the device to the gym and streamed a combination of Siris XM satellite radio, Pandora and Slacker. I never had a prblem with the music quality or buffering issues. A few times I noticed the WiFI icon on the phone disapeard meaning I was streaming over native 3G. As you can imagine, this did cause my phone data usage to increase quite a bit.

The cost for the service is $14.95/day and for this amount you get a real price in advance without hidden fees, charges or bill shock.

Would I recommend the service? Absolutely. My only concern now is traveling without it. Sure I can just pay Verizon its roaming charges but the beauty of the unlimited plan is I live my life the way I like to. I stream music if I choose to. If I want to approve a video shoot my team sends me via e-mail, I can do it while in the cab. I don't have to wait to get to the room and use WiFi.

In short, XCom Global's wireless broadband device makes me more productive and increases my enjoyment when traveling. I'm not sure how to put a price on that.

Metaswitch Asks: Are You Ready to be a Software Telco?

2013-03-02T12:26:58Z

Virtualization has made the IT world much more efficient and cloud technology allows applications to scale up and down at will in a far more cost-effective manner while requiring little to no CAPEX. There is hardly an industry which hasn't been affected as software and hardware vendors have worked together to make sure they are ready for this new world where a single server can run multiple instances of an application on servers which are flung far around the globe. Even the PBX-world has gotten into the game with many vendors - especially those doing business with Fortune-class companies supporting virtualized software communications servers.

In a recent conversation with Steve Gleave (pictured) and Carol Daniels of Metaswith at Mobile World Congress 2013, I learned the company is taking the move to virtualization seriously and their recent product launch of 19 months ago - the SBC, was developed to run in a such an environment.

The benefits of this evolution are obvious - carriers will be able to utilize the same virtualized technology they use in their data centers in their networks and purchase in a far more flexible way. Moreover, their services will run on bare-metal servers and will scale far more rapidly. This means they can take advantage of public clouds, virtual private clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds - all the amazing choices a typical enterprise has today. Security, cost and CAPEX versus OPEX decisions will likely drive their decisions - again, just like an enterprise or data center decision-maker.

One other crucial benefit of this move is there will be more choice for carriers looking to deploy solutions from the more innovative companies in the market. Typically these are the players who do the most interesting things but they quite often run out of money before carriers deploy their solutions and subsequently they go under. For me its been about 30 years spent meeting the principals of these doomed entities - early in my career at trade shows such as TCA, SuperComm, ICA, Computer Telephony and NATA which took place in the eighties and nineties.

The large-scale euthanizing of innovative telco suppliers (and many of the events they attended as a side-effect) has created a cycle of uncertainty where carriers want to be sure their solution partners are going to be around for the long-haul. Moreover they want them to be there to scale rapidly and service what they sell. In the world of hardware this means a new vendor has to have very deep pockets to be able to sell to large carriers.

What has become common in the market is for CSPs to wait for the larger players to emulate what the smaller guys are doing and just buy from the company they arre used to doing business with. Or in other cases, the smaller players would be "coerced" into agreements with large equipment providers who would take part of the revenue from the sale and provide the gravitas, relationships and support needed to keep the large carrier happy. This is how Acme Packet got its start for example and in doing so, took out the competition in the SBC space last decade.

The point is, now hardware players will become software companies which means the bar for purchase from a large telco while still high, has dropped down quite a bit. This was the goal by the way of the ATCA modular communications initiative last decade from Intel where hardware vendors could all write software on a single hardware standard but the Intel division certainly wasn't pulling its own weight as evidenced by the fact it was sold off to Radisys in 2007 for $25M.

This time though the chicken-and-egg problem may finally have eroded allowing current carriers to be far more flexible in the new services they offer and upstart carriers can rapidly scale and compete with incumbents without having to purchase massive amounts of central office equipment to get started.

Gleave further discussed the industry's proactive push towards Network Standards Virtualization through the ETSI working group by the same name. The backers of this initiative are the largest global carriers such as AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Verizon and 52 other vendors joined together to support this initiative this past January. Obviously there seems to be a huge push to shake up the way comms systems are designed.

You may remember, Metaswitch once owned a separate company called Data Connection which was very strong in developing and selling low-level protocol software stacks and related solutions. The two companies merged some years back into the parent company. Gleave emphasized, "We have software experience." He continued with a bit more confidence, "Writing for multicore and hypervisor environments are skills we believe we have as well." He added in a manner which seemed to be subtly taunting the competition, "All the core functions [of our solutions] such as IMS have been rewritten from the ground up to run in the cloud."

Expect the Metaswitch you know as the application server, gateway and SBC company to still do all these things but in software, running in virtualized environments on bare-metal servers. Their goal is to sell these solutions to you in order to turn your hardware telco into a software telco.

As a result of the meeting I asked Steve Gleave to speak on being a software telco at ITEXPO in Las Vegas, August 27-29 in Las Vegas. He is a great speaker and worth the trip to come see. I would mark your calendar now.

IPgallery Helps Carriers Become Social Hub and More

2013-03-01T19:57:11Z

Communications service providers once the center of the customer's world have awoken to the new reality - social and apps are the new hub. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and a wave of other social networks have fully overtaken the telephone number as the primary method of communicating among many - especially younger users. Then there are the the OTT VoIP and video vendors such as Skype. The telephone number has gone from being a protected client relationship to an afterthought. Even the bright spot related to phone numbers - massive texting revenue has recently been eroded by OTT apps like WhatsApp and even iOS messaging which seamlessly takes text messages off the operator network.

Enter IPgallery, a company playing in the IP communications carrier space for over a decade who wants to help service providers become the focal point of this brave new world of social and apps. Their suggestion is to provide customers with a social communications and hosted-PBX solution which integrates so seamlessly with popular web-based servies that users will rarely need to leave the comfort of the environment. An HTML5 interface allows a cloud-based service to tap into APIs of a slew of other companies to provide social, mapping and just about anything else a user can think of.

Just like a person might use HootSuite as a central hub to interface with numerous social networks, IPgallery helps carriers provide customized user interfaces which they believe are captivating enough to keep consumers living inside them.

Consumers for their part have shown a willingness to spend huge amounts off time interfacing with specific services such as Facebook. In fact, companies are tripping over themselves to have users interact with them on the world's most-popular social network. Carriers have a shot to get control back by providing customers with a user interface worth "living in."

In addition, they can add services such as shopping and entertainment and even combine location information to provide compelling applications which rival those of the OTT world. As carrier information is even richer than what is available to typical smart phone applications, they can actually provide better services than consumers can get elsewhere.

At Mobile World Congress in 2013 the Israeli company showed me an app they wrote which accesses Facebook and Maps and provides the photos of friends on their actual locations on a map. A user can select one or more friends and start a group communication, complete with file sharing and collaboration.

There is a great deal more - such as integrated e-learning, a hosted PBX with separate skins and functionality broken out by department such as accounting or sales. Finally, operators can add functionality by providing cloud-storage which could be used to hold content which is shared between users on the system.

IPgallery functions as part software/integration vendor and part systems-integrator, working with carriers the world-over to develop solutions which they need in their particular markets. This allows carriers to focus on their core competency while taking advantage of best-practices being developed by other service providers.

We often hear of discussion revolving around whether carriers are ok just being "dumb pipe" providers and regardless of the answer, there is definite value in owning the home page of the customer's world. Amazon has used this prime real estate to successfully push Kindle devices and Google uses it to push its Chrome OS, tablets and other devices.

Perhaps the better question is - what are the benefits from being the gateway to your customer's online activities including social, commerce and shopping? The answer of course is increased revenue and flexibility. And as service providers grapple with stagnant to lower ARPU and increasing network costs as they upgrade to 4G and beyond, exploring new revenue opportunities which could also reduce churn seems to make a lot of sense.

Telenity Enables M2M, Location Based Ads at MWC2013

2013-02-28T19:40:32Z

The big news out of Monroe, CT based Telenity at Mobile World Congress 2013 is the company's new M2M and LBS solutions. On the M2M front the company has announced m2mConnect which handles connectivity management of m2m devices. The idea here is to auto-provision, activate, monitor and diagnose M2M solutions in the lowest-cost way possible. As Dr. Gurol Akman, VTO and EVP of R&D explains, M2M customers are very low ARPU and you have to ensure you minimize your support cost.

m2mEnable on the other hand is a service which allows collaboration of market players such as those who provide sensors, devices, connectivity, transport of the information over the network and of course the applications which makes use of the data.

M2M is a very rich technology applying to many markets but for now Telenity is focusing on a few of them such as automotive, smart meters and healthcare.

In other show news, the company has a series of location-based announcements Canvas SmartLBA which handles advertisement targeting. The solution is complete with APIs as well as web portals for partners, subscribers, admins and customer care. Moreover it includes support for various charging models and OSS enablers which integrate with network management systems. Finally there is an innovative solution which tracks the locations and travel patterns of high-ARPU customers allowing a carrier to ensure its network coverage is in-line with profit potential.

He also mentioned the company's inclusion of a subscriber consent management capabilities through its Canvas ConsentManager which as the name implies allows carriers to ensure compliance with privacy wishes and regulations.

Comverse Gets Social at MWC2013

2013-02-28T17:49:07Z

Comverse showed me their Share solution at Mobile World Congress 2013 which allows carriers to deliver a Facebook app giving the user a portal into their subscriber account. Once you enter the app, you are prompted to enter a phone number and are subsequently sent a text message allowing you to get a code which enables authentication.

At this point you can check your account balance, send notes to customer care and more. The operator benefits as well because they can mine the user likes and preferences allowing them to determine for example if they may be a candidate for a bundle or special offering.

Moreover by integrating the traditional knowledge a carrier has about a customer, for example what device they use, they can offered targeted ads. For example if they are an Android user with a Samsung device near contract-end, they may be interested and likely to click on an ad for an HTC One.

In addition, Alice Bartram, AVP Portfolio Marketing told me there is a strong push into the cloud, allowing a service provider to outsource their MMS to the company and thus minimize CAPEX spending. Moreover, there is a focus here at the show on telling operators that Comverse is the right partner to bring them into the world of new services. This is done by first bringing existing services into the world of IMS and then enabling new next-gen IP services to be rolled out quickly.

Point being, we aren't moving to an all-IP world tomorrow but that is the destination. As we travel down the road, carriers need to be able to provide new as well as legacy services to their diverse subscriber base.

NICE Systems at MWC2013

2013-02-28T16:39:42Z

At Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona NICE had a very compelling story regarding its multiple product lines which are generally analytics, security, financial and the contact center. In a conversation with Yaniv Zukerman and Eyal Kirshner I learned the company will be focusing more on its multi-channel analytics solutions across its product lines. Moreover, we will see more cloud solutions from them as well - including in the anti-fraud space. This technology will be rolled out across product lines - and used to allow for CFPB compliance. The solution tells agents what they can and can't say including disclaimers. In fact the company showed this product at the show - complete with providing an activity trail which can be provided to regulators in case of an audit. Speaking of the back office, Zukerman tells me there are increasing threats in this area and the company's anti-fraud technology tracks patterns and can help determine malicious activity and fraudsters.

Yaniv Zukerman and Eyal Kirshner of NICE at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona

In addition, the company's Voice of the Customer solution allows an innovative way of using text messaging to allow free-form survey responses via text post interaction which can be live, via phone, visit to website etc. Again, this is free-form text messaging allowing a customer to respond however they want and the analytics kicks in to respond accordingly. They could say for example, I really think the agent I just spoke with, "Jim Smith" is atrocious.The information supplied by the customer is then used to alter training of the particular agent if needed. It can further be used to modify products or product training. The idea is acting in real-time to business challenges. In one example a survey after a flight allowed the crew manager to get the results immediately and then call a meeting to adjust before the next flight took off.

The product also is able to determine which interactions could be used as an upsell opportunity. Speaking of which, the company's Service-to-Sales solution in conjunction with IBM the uses analytics to determine if an upsell opportunity exists on a service call. At this point, the agent is guided through the process of selling the customer in a seamless manner which Zukerman tells me shortens the sales cycle.

The company also discussed its Mobile Network Optimization solution designed to help wireless carriers see a 3D view of a city's wireless coverage based upon its deployment of base stations, small cells and femtocells. The system does its best to approximate what real-world coverage will be indoors where most of large-city traffic emanates from.

NICE also showed a real-time-authentication solution using voice-biometrics. It auto-enrolls customers based on past conversations and shows the agent if the person is verified or not. If there is a doubt about the caller's identity, an authentication process can be launched.

Another product designed to lubricate the sales and service process is Mobile Reach which the company tells me integrates with mobile apps and allows a user to instantly connect with a call center if there is a problem with a transaction. At this point the agent is able to follow the exact context of what the user is doing and they can subsequently push information back and forth. For example an agent can push the specifics of a special plan the prospect could be eligible for and the caller could send a photo of their ID to prove who they are.

Its interesting to see the numerous product lines NICE has - they seem to overlap more and more as time progresses. For example, security which once was needed primarily in financial services is now needed more broadly as threats have become more common. Biometrics - once used primarily by the military is being rolled out to call centers across all sorts of companies looking to reduce the amount of time agents spend on the phone and to improve customer service and retention.

The silos which once existed seem to be eroding and as this continues, it seem NICE is well-positioned to provide solutions across a wide range of markets.

Smith Micro Extends MDM Standard to Chipset Level

2013-02-28T14:45:02Z

Smith Micro's main message at Mobile World Congress 2013 was that wirelss broadband connectivity is going to become easier. Carla Fitzgerald, VP Marketing Wireless & Mobility explained how the company has worked with chipset vendors to get its QuickLink MBIM Middleware installed at the chip level in various computer systems.

She said, "Connectivity originally started as an application where the user was once forced to be an IT administrator." She continued, "But now with standards like MBIM and Smith Micro working with chipset vendors, connectivity will be automatic regardless of operating system."

The benfits for users will be the ability to have backward and forward compatability across not only operating system versions but operating systems as well meaning you could take a USB stick modem and seamlessly have it work regardless of your system. Currently the middleware supports just about anything you would want to use such as Windows 7, Vista, XP, Mac OSX and Linux.

There are obvious benefits for carriers as well since this advanacement "lubricates" the system meaning it should be simpler for users to connect to networks regardless of the device they purchase.

Dialogic Fuels Networks, Augments WebRTC

2013-02-28T00:23:01Z

Having covered Dialogic for about two decades I can tell you they were an integral player in the converging world of communications and technology. When you leave a voicemail, call into a call center or benefit from a telecom advancement quite often a Dialogic product is involved by providing an interface and performing some sort of processing behind the scenes.

After rolling up much of the competitive space and other telecom vendors as well, the company found itself in a situation where much of its core business was being eliminated as many of the tasks you once needed proprietary boards to handle could be taken care of through software on ever-more powerful Intel CPUs.

If this challenge wasn't enough of an issue, Asterisk made it easy to have a standardized base of solutions to build on top of when looking to solve the problems you once had to rely exclusively on Dialogic to provide.

In response to this pressure the company has relaunched itself with a new branding campaign titled "Network Fuel" which is designed to remind carriers the company can help it solve a myriad of networking challenges for them.

Andrew Goldberg, Dialogic Senior VP of Strategy & Marketing proudly stands in front of signs depicting thee company's rebranding efforts

Andrew Goldberg, the company's Senior VP of Strategy & Marketing took me through the company's new reorganized product line but started by saying the goal of the company is to make networks better. The three pillars of the Network Fuel paradigm are as follows:

Any to any networking/interconnection which includes gateways, control switch, SBCs, session-management, signaling management which allows for roaming, etc.

Network congestion - which is a rebrand of bandwidth optimization. They refer to this new area as "amplifying capacity" which includes VoIP, video and more recently, data. He explains that Dialogic has new products coming which will sit in network core and backhaul, optimize and amplify capacity - even if the data is currently optimized. He says carriers can build more network or deploy the company's technology and amplify what they have. He says the ROI gets even better in developing markets where backhaul is handled by satellite and microwave. "Capacity is at a premium," he emphasized. He continued to say their solutions are a better CAPEX and OPEX solution.

Finally there is application enablement which as you may recall harkens back to the company's long-history of being the underlying technology of the app-gen business of the 1990s which allowed developers for the first time to use a GUI to write telecom applications. Sure, this seems like its no big deal now but when you consider PBXs and central office switches of the time wouldn't imagine the concept of open APIs on their systems, you see why Dialogic's entry into the open telecom space was a game-changer.

Speaking of game-changing this is what he said about WebRTC - the company knows this is a huge area of opportunity and envisions having its PowerMedia solutions be the integration layer allowing additions like voicemail, video-mail, collaboration, multi-party-conferencing, call recording and more. He said in fact PowerMedia as a software media server fits in the middle and turns WebRTC into something people want "beyond a novelty."

The reason this is interesting has to do with the IP telephony space which first emerged in the late 1990s. As some of you recall, in 1997 I went to the then-prevalent COMDEX trade show to tell people my company, TMC was about to launch a magazine called Internet Telephony. The reaction was unanimous - why do we need a magazine on a hobbyist toy? They may as well have called it a "novelty" right?

What most didn't see coming was a thriving IP telephony/VoIP gateway business enabled by companies providing boards and software such as Dialogic. It turns out, it only took a few modifications to adapt current boards used in voicemail systems to handle real-time IP communications. From there, the calling card market started to adopt VoIP and we soon saw IP-based PBX and ACD solutions emerge. Amazingly this simple concept of transporting communications over IP is responsible for the FCC discussing the sunsetting of the PSTN or traditional telephone network later this decade.

The point is WebRTC as Goldberg describes it sounds exactly like the VoIP market when it emerged more than 15 years ago. Will it be as big? Bigger? No one knows for sure but Dialogic is once again positioning itself to be in the middle of the action - "fueling" not only your network but development efforts as investors, developers, carriers, web portals and start-ups try to strike it rich in this new and exciting market.

To learn more about WebRTC see the recent TMC webinar Dialogic recently held on the matter and visit them live at WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta, June 25-27, 2013.

Napatech Focuses on Analytics at MWC2013

2013-02-27T18:40:50Z

A few big trends at Mobile World Congress 2013 had to do with helping carriers make money - quite often through analytics. Spending some time with Daniel Barry at Napatech shows his company is certainly in line with trends at the show.

By utilizing an array of hardware adapters, the company uses off-the-shelf servers to enable carriers and the suppliers who they purchase from to build scaleable applications for big data analysis. Such solutions could help operators deliver new services rapidly to respond to an ever-changing market.

To show the power of the company's technology they showed a demo of a Dell R720 off-the-shelf server which boasted 100 Gbps system throughput with their adapters inside.

Moreover, a recent agreement with Qosmos allows the latter's DPI and metadata extraction engine to be directly linked to Napatech's solutions.

Future plans increase ever-faster solutions which extoll the benefits of Napatech which Barry explains are performance and agility. He continued that his customized hardware solutions provide tremendous performance and using freely available hardware means you can easily upgrade systems without much effort.

Teoco Shows Predictive Geotargeting at MWC2013

2013-02-27T17:50:02Z

At Mobile World Congress 2013 Teoco explained how they have carved out a niche in the market focusing on BSS and OSS analytics while taking advantage of geolocation to ensure operators not only serve their customer with greater profitability, they can also capture new revenue models.

The Virginia-based company has provided carrier solutions in the past such as service assurance such as capacity planning, managing network congestion, etc. They also provide network optimization like suggesting what direction a tower should tilt. Finally, margin assurance is a big area of focus - which in one case they say saved a customer half a billion dollars in five years through a variety of analytics projects such as reducing access charges, modifying contracts with suppliers, fixing uneven roaming scenarios, tower location analysis, network routing and other projects.

Jonjie Sena and Faye Henris spent some time with me providing details on how geoloaction teechnology coupled with analytics which sits on top of the above core businesses is where the real opportunity lies.

The company's INrange offering is a predictive analytics geolocation solution which determines with a high degree off accuracy where a user will be in the future. By looking at call detail, tower hand-off records and a slew of other data, including how long a person stays within a certain radius, the solution can help carriers target ads to customers in a brand new way - based on their likeliness to pass by a shop or head in a direction.

Sena explains that if geotargeted ads get a 4-5x premium over traditional advertisements, ads which predict where you will be and can influence behavior should be far more valuable. In fact he points out 70-80% of purchases are pre-planned suggesting typical location-based ads can at best get 30% of consumer spend. The idea here is there is a lot of money being left on the the table by carriers who currently get a very small portion of the advertising market.

Customers for their part need to opt-in to receive offers and can select which vendors they want to hear from and even what sort of offers they want. Another benefit of the technology includes no reliance on GPS which means no battery drain.

Carriers have watched tens of billions of advertsing dollars be made off networks they provide and have hoped to get a piece of an increasing consumer spend since the days of IMS promised carriers would be in control of the apps their customers use. Apple and Google quickly dashed such hopes and plans. Carriers however still own crucial data which can be very useful in providing premium ads, meaning if they play their cards right, they could get a piece of an ever-expanding ad pie.

MATRIX Software: Charging and Policy Solutions for 4G and Shared Plans

2013-02-27T16:29:00Z

As carriers move to shared data plans and LTE becomes prevalent, the old way of charging and policy need an upgrade. Enter MATRIXX Software with their real-time charging, policy and analytics solutions which enable today's carriers to keep up with the latest in technology.

Shared plans were championed by Verizon and others and the success of such solutions in increasing ARPU (although it should be pointed out the old ARPU model dissolves when a User has multiple devices) means we can expect many carriers to adopt similar models the world-over.

The MATRIX Charging Engine has been designed from the ground up to give carriers flexibility in how they charge and deliver new bundles to their customers whether they be consumers, SMB or the enterprise.

Jennifer Kyriakakis VP of Marketing and company co-founder spoke with me at length about the company and its goal to become a big player in the market. Customers include Swisscom and as more carriers move to 4G LTE and shared plans, we can expect MATRIXX Software to be busy courting new carriers.

Mobidia Tackles Bill Shock at MWC2013

2013-02-27T15:45:23Z

Chris Hill (pictured) the VP of Marketing at Mobidia was euphoric in telling me about the growth of the company's new app My Data Manager which has had 3.5 million downloads in the past 12 months. As bill shock becomes a larger problem which is amplified by the speed of 4G networks, users - especially when roaming, are literally a movie away from being hundreds of dollars above their typical monthly costs if they aren't careful.

The app runs in the background on iOS and Android and monitors app usage and cellular usage anonymously sending data back to the company if the user agrees to it. To date, over one million people have signed up to allow their data to be tracked meaning Mobidia has some incredible information about mobile use trends. For example, eBay and Amazon were way ahead of the next ecommerce site on Black Friday.

Another tidbit of information is messaging and voip apps seem to have dominant players which are different in each country. Skype of course is a constant and Facebook Messenger is growing rapidly but other players seem to have regional strength.

The company monetizes the app via this data - selling it to investors, and even a VoIP company buys the data to compare themselves to others in the market. Carriers too have become customers and can use the data to target specific plans. For example, heavy Pandora users can be given special offers to use a Spotify plan.

Hill tells me a new frontier is mobile advertising and they are looking for ways to use their data in this space as well.

We often see fremium apps do well as some users become paid over time and ad-supported apps do well as advertisers pay the bills. Mobidia may be one of the few new companies using big data and the subsequent analytics they imply to generate a nice living from giving away an app to the masses.

Tangoe Integrates MDM and TEM

2013-02-27T14:44:48Z

At Mobile World Congress 2013 Tangoe was discussing the company's integrated solutions which combine TEM and MDM allowing telecom expense management and mobile device management to be handled with a single sign-on and user interface. As Director of Product Marketing Troy Fulton (pictured) explained to me, with 4G networks, bill shock can be quite real as you can be roaming and rapidly go way over your allotment of data.

The companies rTEM solutions can deal with such a scenario in ten minutes he says. Moreover, Tangoe realizes devices have valuable information on them - in fact many large enterprises spend 57% of their IT budgets on mobility, making it quite strategic says Fulton. He further explained in a big data analytics world, this data becomes more important than ever and as a result the company focuses extensively on an end-of-life recycling program where important data is wiped before the device leaves corporate hands.

Another major area of security is jailbroken or rooted phones and Tangoe's solutions deal with this scenario in a number of ways. It first takes into account who the user is, if the situation is a case of BYOD, is it a corporate liable device, etc.

Actions which can be taken as a result are to lock the device, and notify the user in their language. Moreover they can be blocked from exchange access, App Store access, the MDM profile can be wiped from the device meaning it can't access enterprise resources, etc. If content and data are protected in a secure container on the phone or gadget, this data can be removed as well.

The bottom line is Tangoe is differentiating itself by integrating its MDM and TEM solutions making life easier for stakeholders as well as reducing cost by minimizing bill shock and protecting corporate data from leaking.

Tellabs Outlines Carrier Backhaul Challenge and Opportunity

2013-02-26T20:38:04Z

Tellabs had some scary news for operators at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona as they outlined the detachment of user expectations in wireless which follow Moore's Law versus operator cost which is increasing rapidly. This according to Stuart Benington (below) who is a global director at the company. Citing an increased capacity shortage worldwide he went on to say there is an "investment shortfall" ranging between 1.2 petabytes in North America to 9.4 petabytes in the APAC region.

Gary Kim recently wrote about the issue as well emphasizing the nine-billion dollar investment deficit carriers will experience over the next few years. The chart above shows the details.

Enter the company's SDN application solutions demonstrated to me by Benington and George Stenitzer (below) who is the VP of Marketing. To address capacity issues you generally need to plan for peak utilization of the network which means a good deal of potential waste during non-peak hours. Using SDN however, a network can adjust to ebbs and flows in network demand. The Tellabs 8000 INM sees excessive network congestion and/or link utilization traffic on the network and using OpenFlow and SDN it temporarily reroutes traffic to parts of the network which are experiencing less utilization.

The point here is communications service providers can use this solution to ensure they don't have to spend the amount of money needed to handle maximal capacity in all areas where they provide service. The goal is to spend the "right" amount of money to reduce churn and keep devices satiated and users "happy."

In other news, the company's 8602 SON small cell solution is a form factor minimized and cost-optimized derivative of their existing cell site gateway technology. With small cells, Benington says, deployment is different than macro alternatives. "Its looks a lot more like a fixed broadband application," he says. Moreover, he explains this means the installation environment must bee optimized and cost-efficient. This is why the Tellabs SON technology which provides for plug-and-play capability with auto-discovery and auto-update allows a tech with minimal experience to get endpoints up and running quickly and accurately.

Both Benington and Stenitzer emphasized that with multiple connectivity options and 3Gbps capacity this environmentally-hardened solution fits nicely in a light pole.

Another bit of Tellabs news is a push for fiber to the desktop in the enterprise. The company's optical network termination unit the 120 mini ONT is a cost-effective product which brings the promise of virtually unlimited bandwidth to a cubicle near you. For large installations the company has seen savings of up to 70% on TCO (imagine there is no need to lay Cat-7,8,9 cable), up to 80% on power when HVAC costs are considered and up to 90% savings on space.

You may be shaking your head at this point as other vendors beleive copper is being replaced very nicely by WiFi and to some degree this is an accurate point. However in situations where huge amounts of bandwidth are needed to be shuttled about, fiber is a logical alternative. This further explains why Sandia National Labs is a marquee customer of this new solution and is said to be saving $20M over fiver years by ditching copper.

Tellabs seems to have delivered on some important issues affecting its customers including reducing churn and saving customers money. While news of underinvestment in the backhaul space can be scary, the good news according to research is, every one dollar of investment in backhaul solutions made by carriers should acheive a commensurate $4 decrease in churn.