TMCnet Feature

Wireless service providers that are grappling with the mobile data boom may be interested to learn that Redwood City, Calif.-based Seven has software that can lessen the load by 25 percent and enable better handset power efficiency in the process.

The client and server software, Open Channel, looks at traffic between applications and the cloud and identifies patterns that indicate redundant traffic, explains Ross Bott. He is president and CEO of 11-year-old Seven, which got its start by selling white-label messaging services to wireless carriers.

Facebook (News - Alert), e-commerce applications and news feeds are perfect candidates for Open Channel intervention, says Bott, adding that streaming applications are not. That’s because with Facebook, for example, a lot of what happens is status updates of friends and what’s going on with them. The Open Channel solution, which caches the actual content on the wireless handset, figures out what is truly new in those updates and captures only that new content, he says.

Open Channel also works to extend the life of handset battery power by keeping the radio off when its use is not needed. The software is available initially for Android (News - Alert) phones, but support for Apple devices is in the plan.

While potential customers of Open Channel include handset vendors and service providers, the first major customer of this will be a service provider. Seven is in late stage trials now with tier 1 service providers in Europe and the U.S., Bott tells TMC (News - Alert). He adds that service providers continue to spend millions and even billions on their network infrastructure, so anything they can do to make more efficient use of their networks is attractive.

Indeed. According to the Cisco (News - Alert) Visual Networking Index, global mobile traffic in 2010 grew 159 percent. By 2015, a whopping 15 billion networked devices will populate our world, according to Cisco. That’s more than twice the planet’s population. The Cisco VNI goes on to project that global mobile Internet data traffic will increase 26 times from 2010 to 2015, to 6.3 exabytes per month (or 75 exabytes annually).

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