Mobile broadband gateway developer Stoke, Inc. and Zhilabs, a provider of mobile data network intelligence platforms, have teamed to create an integrated mobile data offload and traffic optimization solution that provides operators with the ability to manage explosive demand for mobile data. The combined capability delivers fine-grained visibility and control of traffic, enabling operators to apply management policies to reduce costs, improve use of network resources and a greatly improved customer experience.
According to a recent report from Juniper Research, the amount of data traffic generated by smartphones, featurephones, and tablets will exceed 14,000 Petabytes by 2015 – the equivalent of 14,000 billion movie downloads or three trillion music tracks. Mobile data operators are struggling to accommodate this demand by deploying traffic management and optimization solutions, but are challenged to meet their requirements for flexibility and control while maintaining network speeds and efficiency.
Operators can resolve specific traffic conditions and make optimization, offload and traffic re-direction decisions using the control point created by the Iu-PS breakout and management capabilities of Stoke’s 3GPP-standard Mobile Data Offload gateway together with Zhilabs’ insight into RAN and Core network conditions. This integrated functionality ensures that operators can put their network and optimization resources to maximum use while simultaneously optimizing the user experience.
“Stoke’s enhanced Mobile Data Offload solution provides subscriber RAN location information through an API to adjacent management and optimization applications,” said Michael Homeier, VP of Product Management at Stoke. “Zhilabs is able to leverage this data to view network conditions from end-to-end. This allows operators to invoke extremely precise control measures to relieve pressure on network elements, including breaking out selected sessions before the core and re-directing to nearby content sources, optimization services, or to the Internet.”
“It is almost impossible for operators to understand their customers or give them a relevant network experience without a complete picture of what is happening on the network,” said Joan Raventós, CEO at Zhilabs. “Operators need to know where congestion is occurring, what device types or applications are dominating particular locations, and subscriber use rankings. Stoke provides the required RAN location information to help pinpoint problem areas, as well as the means to apply operator policy to resolve traffic congestion.”
Features of the Stoke and Zhilabs solution:
* Combines granular visibility with precise control, dramatically enhancing the operator’s traffic management tool kit
* Offload and traffic redirection decisions can be made based on real-time network conditions
* The resulting levels of control and resource optimization have been shown in large-scale trials to reduce capacity demand and associated capital and operations expense by 15{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} or more.
