Offload Solutions Address Mobile Data Boom

By Paula Bernier (News - Alert)

Femtocells are one method of offloading traffic from overburdened cellular networks. But they’re not the only one.

Equipment suppliers now are pushing a variety of solutions to help wireless operators better address capacity concerns on the cellular networks of today and tomorrow. In fact, so popular is this idea that Peter Jarich (News - Alert), an analyst with Current Analysis, referred to offload as “the sleeper theme” of last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in his Feb. 4 blog.

Indeed, NGN magazine has recognized this trend as well, having recently conducted offload-related discussions with at least three equipment providers.

Tellabs last month unveiled what it calls the Smart Internet Breakout Gateway (News - Alert), which the company claims offers instant savings by diverting as much as 70 percent of Internet-bound traffic from the network core. The product, which leverages the technology Tellabs got with its recent purchase of WiChorus (News - Alert), was designed to help service providers address the very immediate problem they’re facing as their networks are choked by Internet traffic, says Vikram Saksena (News - Alert), executive vice president and CTO at Tellabs.

The gateway sits at the edge of the network, in front of the packet core, and offloads the traffic that doesn’t generate any incremental ARPU for the service provider before that traffic goes deeper into the operator’s network and unnecessarily uses up more resources, says Saksena.

While Tellabs and other optical vendors employ ROADM (News - Alert) technology to optimize optical transport to deliver what some may refer to as network offload solutions, this new gateway is doing something entirely different, explains Stu Benington, director of portfolio planning at Tellabs (News - Alert).

“The difference here is that you’re actually looking into the traffic that’s going over these mobile networks, and you’re making decisions based on the signaling that’s going back and forth between the packet core and the node or the cell site” as to what hits the backbone, Benington says. “And you want to keep your packet core assets focused specifically on the highest margin, most important traffic, which is business traffic and so forth; and standard Internet traffic you just need to get back to the Internet.”

While deep packet inspection solutions do part of the job, Saksena says the Tellabs gateway goes at least a step further by offering service providers the ability to do more granular sorting of what traffic is and is not offloaded. Of course, it’s up to the service provider to create the policies around what paths various traffic takes on their networks, says Saksena, but a carrier may decide, for example, to send BlackBerry (News - Alert) e-mail services through the packet core while directing peer-to-peer traffic away from the packet core and on to the Internet.

Tekelec Chief Technology Officer Vince Lesch (News - Alert) also recently spoke with NGN magazine about the theme of overloaded cellular networks and how his company offers probes that work on the user plane, and intelligent data monitoring that enables service providers to get a holistic view of their networks and what services are running over them.

Meanwhile, a company called Aylus Networks (News - Alert) was at Mobile World Congress last month pushing its solutions for heavily-trafficked cellular networks.

“There has been an unprecedented explosion in bandwidth demand for the mobile operators largely brought on by the popularity of the iPhone (News - Alert) and video services,” says Shamim Naqvi, CEO, Aylus Networks. “As a vertically integrated solutions provider, Aylus provides a full suite of traffic management solutions and real-time media sharing and video sharing applications. Aylus transforms the mobile operators’ business models by offering them the ability to better manage the current avalanche of data and media traffic.”

Elsewhere on the wireless offload frontier, Kineto Wireless (News - Alert) has a solution that leverages Wi-Fi technology to help alleviate the stress on cellular networks.

The company’s new Smart Wi-Fi Offload solution offloads all mobile services to Wi-Fi networks. It consists of a gateway and software, which runs on smartphones. The software can be preloaded by the service provider or downloaded by
the user.

For the consumer, Smart Wi-Fi Offload can mean better wireless coverage and performance, says Steve Shaw (News - Alert), Kineto’s vice president of corporate marketing. For the operator, it can result in a lighter load on the network, he says. It also can enable mobile operators to address the mobile VoIP threat by offering discounted or free Wi-Fi calling, Shaw adds.

“Smartphones are driving tremendous increases in mobile data usage, straining mobile networks in the process,” says Jarich of Current Analysis (News - Alert). “Mobile operators need to dramatically increase network capacity in short order, while meeting the performance requirements of their subscriber base. Wi-Fi, installed in millions of homes and offices around the world, as well as in many smartphones themselves, is a natural technology choice for mobile operators to address these growing problems.”

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