Rating: Side-effect is whole bunch of interesting stats
With mobile data traffic set to grow by as much as 10 to 15 per cent a month, network operators are facing a dilemma. How do they expand capacity? An ideal solution would obviously be cost effective. F5 Networks says that intelligent cacheing is the solution.
The aim of cacheing is to speed up network response times. However, as a side-effect, it could also generate valuable data on mobile subscriber behaviour.
The real challenge facing mobile operators in trying to cope with this increased data traffic is do they simply pay for more bandwidth or do they make their networks more intelligent?
Networking specialist, F5, hopes it will be the latter. The company effectively sells a black box which enables intelligent filtering of requests for content generated by handset users.
F5 actually works closely with another networking specialist, Bytemobile, which supplies what are in effect specialist ‘proxy’ servers.
The snag is that the rapid increase in mobile data is putting a tremendous strain on these proxies. What F5 can do is build ‘clusters’ of these proxies and ‘load-balance’ them so that the work is shared out efficiently.
In order to perform this task, F5′s products can drill down into requests being sent from a mobile handset as far as an individual web address (URL). F5′s Sam Pickles calls this ‘intelligent snopping’.
Because they can tell exactly what content is being served, they can monitor, for example, content which is unsuitable for minors – be this gambling or pornography. The same techniques could be used to filter out potential viruses, too.
The statistics which F5s products create can easily fed into the IT systems which a mobile operator possesses. Such products as HP’s OpenView and IBM’s Tivoli, for example.
Being able to drill down into this data, a mobile operator with a WAP portal selling ringtones and music can see what traffic is arriving.
Not only can they gauge what music tracks are popular with their own portal surfers but they can also discover what tracks are being purchased off-portal.
So a product designed to improve customer satisfaction as network response times are kept high has the interesting benefit of creating highly valuable data for mobile operators.
Tony is based in Surrey and is a veteran comms journalist. Tony also writes on the UK market… contact him here tony@mobileinsight.co.uk.
