 | Issue: | Latin America 2013 |
| Article no.: | 5 | |
| Topic: | Brazil’s mobile networks – ready for the World Cup and Olympics? | |
| Author: | Jeff Glueck | |
| Title: | CEO & Opera EVP, Operator Solutions | |
| Organisation: | Skyfire | |
| PDF size: | 474KB |
About author
Jeff Glueck is the CEO of Skyfire and Executive Vice President of Opera Operator Solutions. Mr Glueck is an entrepreneur whose first start-up, site59.com in 1999, grew to over US$125 million in travel ecommerce sales in two years before being acquired by Travelocity where Mr Glueck was subsequently named CMO.
Jeff Glueck holds degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University
Article abstract
Brazil is the world’s fourth largest smartphone market. Cisco predicts OTT streaming video there should reach 251,518 terabytes of data/month; 72 per cent of that will be mobile video. In addition, the World Cup (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016) in Brazil will drive extraordinary data traffic spikes. Operators, traditionally think of installing equipment-based solutions, but there is neither time nor money for this, so a cloud-based, software-defined solutions that lets operators instantly expand network capacity during large events is indicated.
Full Article
Mobile data traffic is exploding all over the world, yet even when compared with world averages, Brazil is in a unique position with regard to video consumption on mobile devices. It is not only is the fourth largest market for smartphones on the planet, its appetite for over-the-top (OTT) streaming video on those smartphones is rapacious. By 2017, mobile data traffic in Brazil is projected by Cisco’s Visual Networking Index to reach a whopping 251,518 terabytes of data per month, with 72 per cent of that data coming from mobile video alone. By contrast, mobile video is projected to make up 66 per cent of all mobile data in the rest of the world.
Compounding the strain of this growth on Brazilian mobile networks is the unique confluence of sporting events taking place in the country in 2014 and 2016: the World Cup and the Summer Olympics, respectively. Both events were huge global draws on mobile devices in 2010, even before smartphone-driven mobile video use began to explode in the manner it has subsequently. Are Brazilian mobile operators actually ready for the challenge that will come from rapid spikes in usage from these events, as well as the hoard of visitors, journalists and others who’ll be coming to the country to revel in and cover these events?
A corollary, as anyone who lives in or has visited Brazil’s major cities of Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo knows, is the automobile traffic that clogs the roads and makes a clean, hassle-free driving experience there nearly impossible. A rising economy means more personal income with which to purchase an automobile, which in turn puts that much more strain on the already-groaning traffic infrastructure. As people in Brazil told me during my last trip there, “If you think this is bad, just wait until the World Cup and Olympics”.
Mobile network infrastructure has the same challenge. The good news is that the operators and the Brazilian government all expect to spend plenty of time and money gearing up, including LTE rollouts around the Olympics and World Cup. Brazil is an incredibly dynamic economy, with impressive growth across the board during the last decade, and telecom executives whom I’ve personally spoken to there are smart and capable enough to recognize the network experience challenges that lay ahead of them.
Brazil happens to be a highly competitive telecoms market, and prices for day passes for data are quite low – while demand for video and other bandwidth-busting data services is exceptionally high, and growing. Eduardo Henrique of Movile, a Latin American mobile entertainment provider, confirms the trend by saying that “Unlike the still-brutally-high data costs in the U.S., prices are actually dropping in Brazil, as carriers offer competitive pricing plans. With prepaid plans the most popular model, the major carriers are offering data plans from 20 to 25 cents per day.”
It begs the question: Are there low-cost, innovative ways for operators to break the cycle of exploding data demand taking an ever-increasing share of network capacity, while data ARPU remains so low? Indeed, there are. Mobile video optimization, deployed in a virtualized, software-defined manner in the cloud, is one. The method that mobile operators like those in Brazil typically had deployed in the past to compress and optimize video was expensive, inflexible and had an extensive time to market – which, alas, is not something Brazil’s operators have the luxury of indulging in this time. Operators would traditionally purchase and install inline hardware for every data centre in order to inspect and potentially optimize all, or virtually all, streams coming across their networks – at least the streams their hardware was capable of handling.
The risk/reward ratio of such an approach is unfortunately too high, at a too-critical time, for Brazilian networks to rely on these hardware-dependent solutions from legacy network architectures of the past. The elastic, spiky, unpredictable manner in which consumers use mobile video requires a flexible, scalable, next-generation architecture that relies on intelligent software residing in the network. Equipment that must be rolled out en masse, over long development cycles, will not meet current needs. Some of the largest spikes in mobile video usage throughout its short history have been ‘event-dependent’ – breaking news, celebrity deaths – and of course large sporting events, to cite an extremely relevant example for Brazilian networks.
This unpredictability requires that operators look to mobile video optimization solutions that instead leverage the cloud to measure, quantify and mitigate individual video sessions that are likely to result in a poor user experience, and aggressively stop annoying ‘buffering’ and long video start times dead in their tracks. When this is done in real time, before the first pixel of video starts to buffer, all the better. After all, no video-loving consumer ever complained about a terrific user experience – although there’s no question that some subset of Brazilian consumers are complaining now, or soon will be without a next-generation approach in place. Cloud-based, software-defined solutions also let operators instantly expand network capacity during large events – like the World Cup and the Olympics – so that users have plenty of video streaming bandwidth available to them.
These flexible, dynamic, next-generation cloud services can provide ‘experience assurance’ in a hectic, unpredictable time. Operators win, certainly – but more importantly, so do their customers. With mobile networks that they can rely on – beyond the ability to make phone calls and text messages – both locals and visitors to Brazil will have the ability to access and seamlessly use platforms like Instagram videos (and their Brazilian equivalents), Facebook and Orkut, video sharing in Twitter – and of course, live streams of every round of the World Cup and every Olympic event, and the huge video-on-demand volumes that will follow each goal scored and Olympic or world record achieved.
Forecasting even next year’s hot video consumption apps and enabling smartphones is tricky, but suffice to say, mobile video will be streamed in enormous quantities, and it will burst through Brazilian operator networks in unpredictable ways, often at times of day and in locations where ‘forecasts’ predicted otherwise. Brazilian operators have the opportunity to couple their LTE rollouts with a new paradigm for network traffic management, and, thanks to the cloud-based nature of these new solutions, get it rolled out with plenty of time to spare – ensuring a network that’s flexible and elastic enough to withstand the video streaming demands that will be coming in 2014, 2016 and beyond.
