Bytemobile's new approach to the data deluge

This is a challenge faced by all mobile broadband carriers, with multipronged remedies for those without the option to snap up rivals – the greater spectral efficiency of 4G and small cell architectures; offload to Wi-Fi and femtocells; greater use of unlicensed frequencies; and most importantly, ever more sophisticated approaches to identifying, prioritizing and handling different types of data.

Initially, the carrier's need to increase quality of service for high value transmissions and customers – and offload those with little ARPU potential – led to intense interest in a bigger, more complex centralized packet core. But now the trend is to make mobile networks as distributed as possible, with intelligence placed nearer to the edge and the end user, reflecting the norms of wireline broadband.

Start-ups like Stoke and majors like Nokia Siemens have refocused traffic and policy management towards the edge and the latest supporting this trend is Bytemobile, which is expanding from its video optimization heartland into a broader adaptive traffic management offering for wireless operators.

Its new T3100 platform, its first to be based on dedicated hardware rather than blade-based software, ticks many of the boxes which are starting to appear on carriers' ticklists – intelligence pushed to the edge; optimized boxes rather than “Swiss army knife” platforms; and the ability to handle all forms of traffic in a uniform and integrated way, while supporting a myriad of different policies and priorities, often adapting on the fly to changing network or user conditions.

With the T3100, the company is moving out of the safe waters of its video optimization comfort zone, and promising a wide array of functionality on its platform, including smart caching, DPI (deep packet inspection), load balancing, traffic steering and analytics.