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Bytemobile, a 10-year-old company that offers data-optimization solutions for bandwidth efficiency and reduced infrastructure costs to wireless carriers, is rolling out two new capabilities to its Unison Mobile Internet Platform.
Both new capabilities were announced March 23. The first extends new algorithms to mobile applications. Consequently, when a smartphone user clicks on the Facebook application, for example, on his homescreen, rather than pulling up the Web site through his smartphone’s browser, the application will load more quickly.
Or, as Bytemobile explains it, the application’s “responsiveness” is increased, not to mention the consumer’s perception of the network improved. In recent trials with operators, the new capability has reportedly been found to deliver a 30 percent data reduction across all application-based traffic.
The second new capability focuses on optimizing automatic updates.
“When you’re using your PC, and Adobe and other companies send you a message asking if you want to update your application, [those messages are] slowing down your machine,” Joel Brand, Bytemobile’s vice president of product management, told eWEEK. “If you’re watching a video … we try to delay that message for when you’re doing other things.”
Based on a cross-section of its 3G customer base, Bytemobile has found automatic software updates to consume an average of 10 percent of network’s total traffic.
“The new auto-update capability enables operators to control download rates based on network congestion, resulting in significant data reduction across this traffic type,” the company said in a statement.
Current Bytemobile customers include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, MetroPCS, Vodafone and more than 100 others, who by definition of their businesses share the need to minimize the data traffic – predominately due to video – that their networks support. This challenge will only heighten as more networks deploy LTE, or 4G, technologies and subscribers consume growing amounts of data on increasingly sophisticated devices.
“One percent of users are using dongles on laptops and generating [approximately] 85 percent of traffic – very few users are generating the majority of the traffic,” Brand said.
For most carriers, he continued, 40 percent of traffic in the pipeline is due to video and 40 percent is due to Web browsing. Brand said Bytemobile thinks of its offerings as “just in time delivery,” as it can prevent a video that a customer has tried to stop or click away from, from continuing to load.
“Unique to us is we have a sense of how long people are watching video,” Brand said. “We know when you press the stop button. We know how long you watched. Today, consumers are channel surfing on their PC the way they’re used to on a television.”
The new capabilities are now live and available to Bytemobile customers.