Akamai, Ericsson Partner on Mobile Data Acceleration

There were 600 million mobile broadband subscribers last year. By 2016, that should reach 5 billion. To help wireless service providers contend with the onslaught of mobile data as a result of such growth, Akamai and Ericsson (News - Alert) are joining forces.

The companies Monday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona announced they are developing software that will enable Ericsson gear to interface with a policy control solution that ties into the Akamai CDN.

“It’s what we call a mobile content accelerator,” said Hans Vestberg (News - Alert), Ericsson president and CEO.

That will allow service providers like the telephone companies to cache popular traffic closer to customers – and within the wireless network. And that will accelerate content delivery, allowing service providers to not only offer a better customer experience, but to justify their investment in the joint Akamai (News - Alert)/Ericsson solutions by offering premium services to end users and content companies, and by enabling those network operators to use their network resources more efficiently.

Ericsson declined to specify which of its products will support the Akamai-related software, saying the software might run on existing or new Ericsson “nodes” in the network, or even on networks not based on Ericsson infrastructure. (Vestberg at one point mentioned the word “appliance.”)

Nonetheless, Akamai and Ericsson said they’ve already test the joint “cloud” solution, as they called it, with developers and expect to introduce it to service providers in the next six months.

“The content owners are ready to go,” said David Kenny, Akamai president. He added that once the companies get enough service providers in a geographical area interested in the joint solution it will be ready to roll.